Winner: Design Your Dream Job

Back in April, we asked regular GOOD readers to tell us what they loved doing so much that they'd do it for free. That should be your job, according to Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem's Children Zone. Or it at least it's a helpful question in dreaming up your ideal career path.

We got more than a hundred wonderful descriptions of potential dream jobs. You can flip through a slideshow of the finalists here.

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The winner is Irene Hernandez with her dream of making the funeral industry greener, and more honest. She wrote:

Green Burial

The work I’d do for free is green burial. The current process of burial in this country is expensive, wasteful, and worst of all, designed to quickly separate the bereaved from their loved ones. Green burial offers choices that bring the dying and the bereaved closer together. I love this work.

Many years ago, I began a program in mortuary science, but dropped out close to its completion because suddenly everything about it felt wrong. I was learning how to clean up death; in essence, I was learning how to make death go away, at great expense not only to the bereaved but to our natural resources as well. The desire to help others at one of the worst times in anyone’s life still hasn’t left me. I’ve been out of it for so long, however, that I need a guiding hand to find my way back.

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Hernandez wins a one-hour career coaching session with Lara Galinsky, of Echoing Green, an incubator and support organization for social entrepreneurs.

Five runners-up will get a copy of Galinsky's book Work on Purpose. They are Enida Bogdani, Kiersten Downs, Deeba Rehman, Tania Torres-Delgado, and Kelly Weigel.

See their entries and the other finalists on our submissions post for this contest.

Congratulations!