501V3 Campaign: Millennials as Elected Officials

The V3 campaign has added a new twist; a blog to encourage Millennials to run for pubilc office.  In According to the first blog post of this new effort on the V3 blog describes what they’re calling 501V3 in this way:

Members of this “We Generation” are now starting to run for and hold elective office—while still in school. Just as we have questions for other politicians, our big question of the students is: how will their background in service inform their positions and decision-making?

I had an email exchange with Robert Egger, the founder of V3, about this new effort on Friday.  In his uniquely enthusiastic style, Robert wrote:

“Can you imagine—what would it be like if this GIANT cohort said—we do not want our service to be channeled exclusively through charities anymore—we want a new avenue to get our skills into the mix, and its politics!!!!”

It is definitely worth watching and supporting this new effort as it launches.

The Millennials Are Coming!

Here is the text of an op-ed I penned for the Chronicle of Philanthropy this week:

The millennials are coming! The millennials are coming! In hallways, boardrooms, and conference calls across the nonprofit world, this warning cry is ringing out.

But too many in the nonprofit world forget that the millennials are already here. They are the people born from 1982 through the late 1990s dominating the world around us. They outnumber the baby boomers who are alive today.

Not preparing for and welcoming the millennials is more than a missed opportunity. It is a significant and perhaps devastating error in judgment by traditional organizations because they need millennials more than the millennials need them. If they are unhappy with their reception by nonprofit organizations, they will simply start their own efforts — overnight, online, at almost no cost.

Millennials are fascinating for how they work (collaboratively); what they believe (that they can make the world a better place); and how they are living (immersed in causes).

Their signature characteristic is their digital fluency. They are uniquely comfortable using a wide variety of social-media tools like cellphones, e-mail, Web sites, blogs, and text messaging, enabling them to spread information widely, quickly, and inexpensively. Their passion and skills combined with their digital dexterity create challenges for more traditional nonprofit organizations.

The nonprofit world that the millennials are entering has matured in its use of social media to connect large networks of supporters. Just a few years ago, only those organizations that were created with connectedness as part of their DNA, like the Genocide Intervention Network and Mobilize.org, were able to thrive in this new era. While the reaction from more traditional organizations was “Do we really have to know about this stuff?,” today the more likely question is “How do we begin?”

And that’s where millennials come in. They know how and where to start using social media for social change. Now nonprofit groups need to let them in, and the best way to do that is to understand the different roles millennials are starting to play as:

Employees. I often hear millennials complain that they are not listened to within their own organizations.

It is not uncommon to hear young people say they feel underappreciated within institutions, but these millennial complaints have more traction than those of previous generations.

Millennials have grown up intently listened to by their parents and teachers, creating a sense of confidence in their own opinions. They are also accustomed to talking online in venues that support open, free-flowing conversations and opinions.

What’s more, their digital adeptness gives them a set of skills and a sense of powerfulness that are unmatched by older colleagues.

Millennials join organizations with an expertise that is important and needed. For all of those reasons, millennial staff members need to be listened to and provided opportunities for meaningful participation in an organization’s key conversations about strategy and operations.

Volunteers. Millennials are passionate about causes and, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, are volunteering in record numbers beginning in middle school and continuing thereafter.

Organizations accustomed to top-down hierarchical dictates of when and how volunteers will participate will lose with millennials.

Those that allow them to be creative and have a greater sense of ownership in the cause will be more successful.

The best recent example of these different styles is the difference between the Clinton (top-down) and Obama (bottom-up) campaigns.

Activists. Regardless of how traditional organizations change or act, millennials will support their causes in their own ways, and that will mean often working outside of institutions. Thousands of people can use Facebook to support ending the genocide in Darfur, without necessarily supporting a specific organization.

One can look at this landscape and see a sea of competitors for money and attention — or one can see a field of potential partners, regardless of their size or credentials, that can be knit together into a successful ecosystem of supporters.

How can nonprofit groups embrace the millennials?

The first thing they need to do is show them some respect. I often hear older people and organizations dismiss young people as flighty multitaskers. These young people are vitally important to the nation’s future, but they often feel uninvited to the nonprofit party. They have a great deal to teach organizations and older people about organizing using social media and about working in open, nonproprietary ways, but they will only do so if they are listened to and respected.

The Salvation Army has taken steps in this direction recently, including adding a board seat for a young person.

Nonprofit organizations can also assign their young interns and staff members to take responsibility for using specific social networks to generate interest in their causes; that will be a lot more beneficial to them and the organization than answering the phones and making copies.

Organizations need to teach millennials to become “network weavers,” a term coined by two experts in social-network analysis — Valdes Krebs and June Holley — that refers to the creation of social networks that have a specific purpose beyond just their social relations.

While young people already know how to connect with their peers, very few of them understand what it takes to deliberately create networks that promote social change. As a model, nonprofit groups may want to look at the progress made by Lance Bennett, a professor of communication at the University of Washington, in an effort called Engaged Youth, which is teaching young people in Seattle to use their digital skills to solve social problems.

Almost invariably, the first question posed by many nonprofit leaders is: “What is the best tool to reach young people?”

There is no one silver-bullet blog or Web site. Organizations must stop looking for the “killer app” to connect with millennials and start examining their own organizational culture. They must ask themselves:

• Why do you want to connect with them?
• What conversation do you want to have with them?
• How open are you to listening to them?
• What will you allow them to do that you don’t feel you have to control?

Answering those questions may require some real soul searching. Once that’s done, it is time to start talking with the millennials wherever they are — in person through the Meetup Web site, through blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook — and listen to what they are saying and be ready to make changes to work with them more openly and honestly.

Nonprofit groups also need to teach young people why advocacy and policy change are a vital part of creating long-term systemic change.

When schools started requiring community service in the late 1980s, they dropped civic education. Focus groups conducted by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University, found that students didn’t have a negative view of government and public policy like their boomer parents may have — they had no view and opinion at all.

Perhaps worse, they had no place to explore their views and learn more either on or off their campuses. Nonprofit organizations need to create ways for young people to explore issues and ideas.

However, organizations beware, millennials are very clear that they don’t want to be “sold” on issues. Advocates with set ideas on their issues, who just want to recruit younger participants to their cause without real discussion, should spend their time elsewhere.

Young people are engaged in promoting charitable causes in very large numbers as volunteers, staff members, and social entrepreneurs. But as a recent study by the research company Synovate reported, still millions more, particularly black and Hispanic girls, aren’t hooked in and networked. It is up to nonprofit groups to get more young people involved.

Millions of millennials are passionately engaged in causes, though not necessarily connected to specific nonprofit organizations. Millions more regularly practice their own form of citizenship using the tools and processes of democracy (e.g., sharing information, circulating petitions, mobilizing people) to voice their concern about or interest in items that are central to their lives, such as the cancellation of a TV show or organizing friends to attend the opening of a new restaurant.

Those aren’t trivial activities; they represent the latent power of millennials to use their own tools and voices for social-change efforts.

The challenge for nonprofit groups is to invite all of these young people, those already engaged and those who could be engaged, to learn more about their efforts, and to help shape and drive them. The needs of nonprofit groups and the people they serve are great — and they can be matched by the great capacity of the millennials.

Allison Fine is a senior fellow at Demos, a New York think tank, and author of “Social Citizens (beta),” a publication released by the Case Foundation, in Washington. This article is based on that publication; the full version is available online.

Are Millennials Individualists or Collectivists?

Sally Kohn, a writer and moving force behind the Movement Vision Lab for the Center for Community Change, wrote an editorial published in the Chronicle Science Monitor on what she sees as the limitations of Millennial activism; individual action over collective action.

She writes that Millennials are idealistic and passionate about causes, however, their tendency towards what she calls “hyperindividualism” that is magnified by social media will impede social change movements. She writes about social media:

“This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society – the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) – won’t politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.”

I understand the point, and have certainly always believed that online and on land activism are symbiotic and necessary for social change efforts to be successful. However, I think Sally is underestimating the power of social media to lead to social change. She mentions that social change movements have always required collective action going back to the American Revolution, and this is absolutely true, but I don’t see that social media and collective action are mutually exclusive. Millennials can work individually online, but they don’t have to – they have conversations on Facebook and blogs, they organize get togethers using Meetup.com, they mobilize for protest marches using Twitter.

Sally dismisses too easily Millennial activism as individual data points of clicks and pings while missing a broad tapestry of engagement, exploration and action that is changing the world.

Personal Democracy Forum (Day 2)

Amazing set of speakers at the plenary this morning at PDF.

Doug Rushkoff, the author of Open Source Democracy, opened the session. He gave a passionate denunciation of the oxymoron of putting the ideas of “personal” and “democracy” together. Going back to the origins of the notion of the individual in the Renaissance, Rushkoff explained that the rights of the individual reduce a sense of community and inevitably to more centralized, and powerful, government.

This was reinforced in the last century era of top-down media that mythologized the idea that people as individuals are powerful and that they don’t need one another to collaborate to solve problems. We gave problem solving away to others, elected officials, broadcasters, corporations, in this model. The apex of this model is the idea of “branding.” In Rushkoff’s words, “The brand doesn’t want us engaged with one another , it wants us engaged with it.” Hmmm, fighten words for Millennials who are very engaged with and confident in the social responsibility of various brands.

Rushkoff wasn’t totally negative and said that new social media can create the conditions by which we can finally do things for one another in local, place-based communities.

The next speaker was Morley Winograd the co-author with Michael Hais of, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics. He gave a great overview of the demographics of Millennials and their idealism. Where we diverged was that Morley is very optimistic about Millennial participation in government and public policy beyond voting. His belief is rooted in a historical perspective of civic change generations like the Greatest Generation, the Civil War generation that preceded them. I’m not as optimistic based on the data that informed the Social Citizens paper. Worth another conversation.

Finally, Larry Lessig, professor at Stanford Law School presented. If you’ve never seen Larry present, it’s a must see – like the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal. He gave a very persuasive presentation on the history of corruption in the US government and the grave threats to us now. I don’t have a video link for his presentation this morning, but you can the way he presents here.

Millennials on Board(s)

There is a growing trend of having Millennials on nonprofit boards. In response to our Social Citizens paper, the Salvation Army has created a board seat specifically for a young person. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that business schools, like the one at Columbia University, are placing their students as nonvoting board members at nonprofits. The win/win is that students get to see how boards and decision making works (or doesn’t work!) and boards get the input and advice of young, tech savvy budding entrepreneurs.

But, at the risk of being heretical (which I freely and willingly gravitate towards!) I’ve been wondering if nonprofit boards (I won’t address corporate boards although I’m guessing this line of argument also holds true) aren’t an anachronism of 19th century bureaucratic thinking. Poke into any nonprofit scandal over the past fifteen years and you’ll find a board that wasn’t asking the right questions of the staff (or worse where the board and senior staff were one and the same thereby nullifying the whole questioning thing!) From my experience as a board member, it is very difficult to hop in and out of the operations of an organization and have a real feel for what’s going on — and what’s in organizations that are very open and transparent and well run — imagine what it would be like trying to figure out what’s going on within an organization that is trying to hide something!

I love the idea of Millennials on nonprofit boards to liven things up — but I’d much prefer that they reinvented the whole governance system instead!

The Release of Social Citizens (beta)!

The release of Social Citizens ^BETA today is very exciting for what it isn’t – and what it is. Late last year, Kari Dunn and Ben Binswanger of The Case Foundation asked me to write a paper for the Foundation about the emergence of Millennials, 15-29 year olds, as activists. They wanted to know more about how these young people are using all of their widgets and gadgets for causes.

And that’s when we talked about what the paper isn’t.

We decided to go beyond a simply litany of the ways that young people are using blogs, social networks, and videos to share information about their favorite causes. We wanted to go a step further and ask harder “so what” questions. What does it mean to Millennials to have the ability to become an advocate for their cause instantly, broadly, inexpensively, and what does their ability to do so mean for the rest of us?

The Foundation provided me with an opportunity to cast a wide net across the real of Millennial activism; from Facebook to the Red Campaign, from the presidential campaign trail to the human devastation in Darfur, from Gossip Girls to Invisible Children, a documentary about the difficult lives of the children of Uganda. I followed the trail of email, blogs, YouTube videos, websites, donations, Tweets, and IMs around the country and even across the globe. I interviewed over thirty people, read many articles, papers, books, and websites, and examined the data on who is doing what for causes. And what I found was astounding for its scope, scale, and idealistic intentions.

Marnie Webb, a key informant in the paper, asked, “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging, and “friending” add up to in the end?” And my answer is, “Far more than I imagined, far greater than I had hoped.”

Millennials are doing more than pinging and poking and sharing information about causes. They are radically altering the very notion of what it means to be an active citizen in the process, and that’s why we’re calling them Social Citizens. They are viewing their responsibility to their larger community solely through a cause lens. They are clicking, buying, running, hammering, petitioning, and sharing information with their friends.

And, you, my careful reader, have noticed that there is a “beta” on the end of Social Citizens in the title of the paper. This is to remind that this field of youth activism is changing at breakneck pace. American humorist James Thurber said, “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” And certainly, in this case, we know that there are lots and lots of questions without answers yet — and this is fantastic news to folks like me and my colleagues at the Case Foundation who like having conversations with other people who are interested in increasing the number of people who are actively engaged in trying to improve our world.

However, as encouraging as this news is, their activities raise serious questions. Is it possible to envision a very large generation of citizens who lead their lives at a great distance from government, even lives infused with causes, volunteering and a hopeful outlook about the world. Can government really be irrelevant to their lives, and, if so, is this a good thing for society? Is it important that young people are engaged in public policy advocacy? Is our tendency to connect only with like-minded people using our on line and on land social networks a good thing for activism or a critical bottleneck to the effective scaling for causes? Are social change institutions critical to the future of Social Citizens and their causes or are they becoming old-century anachronisms of top-down hierarchies that can’t survive much longer?

So, what do you think? I hope you’ll read and enjoy Social Citizens ^BETA, and I’m looking forward to our upcoming conversation and your ideas, thoughts, comments, and questions about Social Citizens.