Purpose-Driven career pivot

How Sholeh Alemi Fabbri’s Pivot Launched Good Measure Productions

Zoomer Magazine recently profiled the Founder of Good Measure Productions about her purpose-driven pivot to impact producing. Here is the excerpt of the article by Leann Delap:

Sholeh Fabbri remembers how great she felt when she was working on a couple of fundraising projects before she made her big pivot. “There was an opportunity for me to help with a silent auction for victims of the bushfires in Australia,” where she had lived and worked before her 13-year stint at Global TV’s Entertainment Tonight Canada. Then, as everything shut down in early 2020, Fabbri, the show’s executive producer, pulled together a five-night fundraiser ‘Canada Together: In Concert,’ featuring Shania Twain, William Shatner and Christopher Plummer, which raised $300,000 for Food Banks Canada.

“Those two things began to land for me,” she says. “In my head, I started to explore what I was going to do.” Still, breaking away from her fast-paced life was hard. “I’d covered Cannes, the Oscars, the Grammys, cool things to talk about at cocktail parties. But, what was I doing with all that glamour and excitement?”

“It took the wall falling down on my head,” the 44-year-old says about leaving her big TV job after a management change. “I was super scared — what was I outside of that? — worried and nervous and anxious. I went from having a team of 70 to just me.”

She took a few months off, completed some online courses and volunteered with Native Child and Family Services in Toronto, all “things completely unrelated to producing television.” Fabbri saw a therapist, too. “That was crucial. I wanted to really figure out where my head was at, do a bit of grieving around leaving a job, figure out who am I outside of that space and start paying attention to what lights me up. Where was I most excited?” 

She also saw a career counsellor and started taking people out for coffee. On one coffee date, a peer asked, ‘Have you ever thought about impact producing?’” Fabbri had never heard of it. 

“I was about to walk away from my field, but that made me think I could evolve my job in a whole new way,” she says. “The breadth of my experience had value.” It recharged her, and made her think about how to make impact producing her job. After getting feedback from her peers on Clubhouse, the audio-based social media app, she launched Good Measure Productions in February 2021.

So what is impact producing? It is about “transforming inspiration into impact,” she says. In other words, building the infrastructure for people to engage in activism by connecting them with concrete, real-world steps. She cites a documentary she produced about endangered cetaceans on the Atlantic coast called The Last of the Right Whales, which launched in Canadian theatres in January and will air on CBC in the fall, as an example. “We are building screenings, community panels, education guides, discussion guides, letter-writing campaigns, an active social media campaign to build momentum of the conversation.” 

There are lots of details to be worked out, but Fabbri is happy she “paid attention to the whispers” urging her to make a change. Today, she is in a completely different headspace, fuelled anew by building something meaningful from the ground up. Before that, “I was running on fumes.”

For the full article please visit the Zoomer Magazine page.