Making A Big Fat Bet on this Generation | Social Entrepreneurship

I'm at the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder as a mentor this week, and later today I'll be giving my take on the presentation that has kicked off the stay of each of the several dozen mentors that they have hosted this summer. Since it's the end of the program, I'm going to go a little meta and talk about the big, meaty bet we're all making on our generation to change the world.

A Unique Combination of Influences. Our cohort grew up with a strange combination of influences. We got a big dose of the holdover idealism of the 1960s generation. At the same time, we got the skepticism that characterized the boomer echo and Gen Xers. The important thing about this combination is that it has predisposed us to be critical and not shy about critiquing organizations driven by good intentions rathe than real impact, while keeping us generally idealistic and optimistic about the value of social change efforts.

A Strange Historical Moment. The 1990s was a truly weird moment in history. The Cold War ended, and as much as it was supposed to be the glorious 'end of history,' it actually was the most violent, turbulent decade since WWII. As we started to get into college in the 2000s, and -- in many cases prompted by the horror of September 11th -- looked back to see the real state of the world, many of of us found that what we remembered and what we experienced was vastly different than what most of the world was experiencing.

At the same time, the internet was creating the architecture for an expansion in human capacity and human connection unlike anything in history. Travel was becoming easier, and the end of the Cold War had seen an explosion in global civil society and nonprofit organizations.

Learning in Person. Taking advantages of these opportunities, our generation has had consistently growing rates of volunteerism. Study abroad is growing on just about every campus, and the places that people are going and the types of programs they're studying in are expanding just as rapidly. There is no learning as essential as learning directly from people experiencing the problems, and we've been fortune to have a lot of that very early.

A Growing Support Structure. Importantly, along with the growth in young people getting their hands dirty with social change has been a boom in the institutions that are designed to support that work by critiquing it, contextualizing it, and offering it new expression. Undergraduate centers, incubator and accelerator programs, training conferences - there is an entire ecosystem of organizations working to make sure that young people's efforts have the impact they wish.

Aligned Frameworks. As there has been an expansion in youth engagement, there has also been an expansion in social change efforts of all types. The heightened prominence of "social entrepreneurship" has enabled young people to tap into a language and a field that takes their work out of the context of young do gooders and actually involves them in the global conversation about how best to change the world.

Global Peers. If most of what is discussed here refers to a specific subset of the generation -- namely a certain class of American young people -- the global peer infrastructure is changing rapidly, and from internet communicaton to global conferences, young people who may have a different history but share a common future are finding one another and letting themselves be influenced by one another.

A Question of "Success." No generation has ever had as much of what it needs to change the world so early. In the long-run, however, whether we live up to that promise will be largely based on how we define success in our personal lives, and how that translates to our professional endeavors. If we decide in five years that money and comfort is the primary objective, we'll compromise left and right and quickly learn to the next group to pick up where we left off. If, instead, we define success to include not only money but impact and engagement, it will change the entire structure of our economy.

Photo credit: Mikael Miettinen

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