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Young Philanthropists Unite; Remixing Bush; Fair Voting

  • In These Times is running a standard, informative piece about the financial difficulties that young progressives face in working for the movement once they graduate, debt-ladden, from school. The piece hits a lot of the right notes, and reports on the lack of diversity in progressive politics that this situation engenders. It neglects to report on a few organizations like DMI Scholars and YP4 working to change this situation.

    Most interesting was the mention of Resource Generation (aka the Cool Rich Kids). This is an organization trying to teach wealthy Millennials and Gen Xers how to use their money philanthropically to serve the movement. I'd never heard of them before, but I will be sure to check them out. (Hat tip to Shai Sachs at Planting Liberally, who has some good thoughts on the role of big donors in progressive youth politics in his commentary.)
  • Some Drupal guys are working to scrape the WhiteHouse.gov website of all streaming video and offer it up to the masses to remix and reuse. Pretty cool.PoliticalVideo.org.
  • Apparently a bill in Maine almost robbed students of their right to vote on campus by declaring dorms to not be legal places of residence. Thankfully, the bill failed. What I want to know is this, with all the Google Alerts I'm signed up for, with all the youth blogs I read, how come this is the first time I'm hearing about this issue?
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June 12th, 2007 5:24am
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Shai's right....

Submitted by Alex UA on Tue, 2007-06-12 08:21.

We have to create models that make enough money to sustain the movement. It sucks (doesn’t everything in life?) that we can’t rely upon big donors to fund a/the movement, and I have my doubts about how realistic it is to expect young activists across the nation to figure out how to make money in addition to making change, but what’s the alternative? That vast left-wing conspiracy that Matt Bai wrote about in 2003 was, to a large degree, a bunch of bs, at least on the funding side. I’m beginning to suspect that many of the big-dollar donors are secretly Republicans bent on burning out millenials before they get too rowdy, but I suppose that’s a bit paranoid on my part.

Anyway, I obviously empathize with the woman in the article, and I’m not sure how much longer I can stick this out without either starting up that business or getting out of politics for good. I guess we’ll see…

thanks!

Submitted by shai (not verified) on Wed, 2007-06-13 06:05.

Thanks for the shout out! I definitely appreciate it, and I’m sorry to say I think Alex is right (the VLWC article was smoke and mirrors).

I just posted an idea for creating a business incubator that would help creative but struggling progressives start their own businesses: http://www.plantingliberally.org/nod…. It’s a little bit pie-in-the-sky, but who knows? Maybe a rich donor will save the day. :)