What does purpose-driven leadership mean in times of dehumanization?

What makes a person move from silent indignation to action? At what point does inner life become public responsibility? Within the framework of Social Justice Week, Esade, together with IQS, hosted a dialogue between Òscar Camps, founder of the NGO Open Arms, and Pau Vidal, delegate of the Society of Jesus in Catalonia with extensive experience in refugee camps. Drawing on their personal trajectories, the conversation invited participants to revisit the role of leadership in a world that has normalized the dehumanization of others. 

The conversation, moderated by Mònica Casabayó, Esade professor and promoter of the Bachelor in Transformational Leadership and Social Impact, revolved around a key question for contemporary leadership: how to move from inner life and moral awareness to sustained, transformative action over time. Far from offering easy recipes, the event articulated a deep reflection on purpose, commitment, and individual and institutional responsibility. 

From comfort to taking responsibility 

Òscar Camps explained that the origin of Open Arms was not the result of a planned strategy, but of a personal decision in response to a concrete injustice. After seeing images of refugees trapped in the Mediterranean in 2015, and despite the lack of institutional support at the time, he decided to act based on his experience as a lifeguard and entrepreneur in the sector. 

His account underscored a central idea of purpose-driven leadership: action begins when comfort is interrupted. “Getting up from the couch” became a metaphor for that everyday inertia that paralyzes us and convinces us that nothing depends on us. For Camps, the real obstacle most of us face is not a lack of resources, but resignation. “The vast majority of society is supportive and empathetic, but quiet. We say nothing,” he illustrated. 

We are fighting a system that treats all those people as if they were numbers, disposable goods

“Ten years have passed. It never crossed my mind that the fact of getting up from the couch after seeing the photo of Aylan Kurdi” —the Syrian boy whose lifeless body was photographed on a beach in Turkey— “would lead to ten years of work, the creation of an NGO, and 73,000 lives rescued at sea. I never would have considered it,” he says, while not forgetting that during that time more than 30,000 people have died in the Mediterranean, more than 3,500 of them children. 

Between the personal and the institutional 

Pau Vidal offered a complementary perspective. For years, he worked with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Kenya and South Sudan, accompanying displaced people who live “with their lives on pause,” waiting to be able to return to their homeland. His daily life in the refugee camps went from being a job to becoming a way of life. His mission was to “accompany pain, but also sustain hope.” 

Today, from a more institutional role, he reflects on the importance of articulating grassroots activism with formal structures. “Even though they may seem very far apart, it is important that both sides are connected and have people working for social justice,” he affirms. In his view, the personal, the communal, and the institutional are not opposed, but mutually reinforcing. 

Human rights in the face of permanent contradiction 

Since he began carrying out rescues in the Mediterranean, Camps has denounced the deliberate inaction of the European Union in maritime rescue and the outsourcing of its border management. “When we arrived in Lesbos, we realized that we weren’t only fighting against the waves of the sea, we were also fighting against a system that treated all those people as if they were numbers, disposable goods. But for us, they were fathers, mothers, and children with names and a story,” he explains. 

Human rights are like a museum piece

“If international conventions, maritime law and the founding principles of the European Union were actually obeyed, deaths in the Mediterranean would end,” Camps states. “Human rights are like a museum piece. From time to time, Europe goes to visit them. You can see them, talk about them, exhibit them… but don’t touch them. Don’t even think about truly defending them, because they criminalize you, trivialize you, or persecute you,” he said, referring to his experience leading Open Arms and the criticism received over the years. 

For his part, Vidal referred to the exhaustion of the human rights narrative and the need to move consciences beyond legal argumentation. “The discourse on human rights was based on legal foundations of human dignity, and that has taken us very far, but it has run out of steam. We have to return to stories, to symbols, to images.” For this, “religious and humanist traditions can offer narratives of hospitality, welcome, and dignity.” 

The role of universities in shaping leadership 

Both speakers agreed that the university cannot limit itself to training technically competent professionals, but must contribute to forming well-rounded individuals, with critical thinking and an orientation toward the common good. “Young people are not the future, they are the present. If they have chosen to study and prepare themselves, let it not be to compete, but to have values and an unwavering conscience that motivates each of their actions,” expressed Camps. 

“Competence is very important, but with it alone we won’t get very far,” Vidal added. “We must be competent, conscious, compassionate, and committed,” referring to the 4Cs pedagogical model applied at Esade. He also warned about the ambivalent role that spirituality can play: “It can be a source of mobilization. But when it is a self-complacent and self-centered spirituality, it demobilizes and does not serve the common good or social justice.” 

Frustrations with purpose 

The closing of the event was led by Professor Ferran Macipe, current academic director of the Bachelor’s Degree in Transformational Leadership and Social Impact, who linked the thread of the conversation to Esade’s humanistic tradition, rooted in Jesuit values and the formation of leaders committed to building a more just and inclusive society. 

Macipe articulated one of the central ideas of the event: the sequence that goes from inner life to purpose and from there to action. It is not a linear or universal process. There are different rhythms, trajectories, and triggers, but the essential thing is to remain attentive to the moments that awaken us and get us off the “couch.” 

“The virtue of thinking about others implies renunciation and does not spare us frustration, but it is a frustration that underlines and reinforces meaning: it is a frustration with purpose,” Macipe concluded. “Because we aim high, at the structures that dehumanize. It is worth doing, because it is thanks to those who aimed high in the past that we have all this today.”