infrastructure

I've recently become interested in urban planning and the impact of the Millennial Generation on its future. I'm originally from an area smack dab in the middle of the rust belt. I've read about and observed the many mid-size industrial cities around my hometown, especially Youngstown, Ohio, struggle with keeping crime under control, working around massive population loss, and selling people on the notion that it is important to rebuild these cities' urban cores.

Luckily, many of these cities are already getting back on track. Youngstown, for example, is being guided by the Youngstown 2010 project, a community-drafted plan established in 2002. Cleveland's downtown got an overhaul in the early 1990s. But there is still more work to be done. In doing this work, we need to make sure we understand what resources these communities need in order to solidify plans like these and put them into action.

Many people might ask why this has any connection with Millennials -- why is it important to rebuild these cities when its citizens have been moving to suburbs for years? Why is it important to invest in these urban areas when those young people fortunate enough to go to school will just move away after school? An article in the Washington Business Journal about the connection between the future of urban planning and its connection with Generation X and Millennials gave me an answer.

Millennials are actually pre-disposed to living in urban areas. Their focus on community and convenience demands a short commute to whatever resource they need in their community. Ask any Millennial who uses the Internet to do research for a school project, chats on AIM with two friends, listens to music, and checks on the score of his favorite team's baseball game all at once -- they like to multi-task; they like productivity.

The most important factor in figuring out where we’ll be living in the future is to look at how we’ll be living. Just as the automobile in the 1940s and ’50s and racial turbulence in the 1960s and ’70s drove their parents and grandparents to the suburbs, look for today’s younger generations to affect what tomorrow’s communities will look like.

Just consider developer Jim Abdo’s successful bet in the late 1990s that Gen X-ers (born from 1965 to 1980) would line up for new places in the city if he helped remake Logan Circle.

“Generation X and Generation Y are putting much more emphasis on life-work balance,” says Adam Ducker, managing director at Richard Charles Lesser & Co., a real estate firm based in Bethesda.

One of the main ways to achieve a better life-work balance, Ducker says, is foregoing a large home in the suburbs and the long commute it carries for a smaller home closer to work. Commuting in exchange for a bigger house was a deal baby boomers were willing to make for their family. For younger generations, that’s not a reasonable trade-off.

As you read, a community re-formed on the basis of convenience is a necessary ingredient in rebuilding our urban areas. In addition, their dedication to the environment is another reason why Millennials might be interested in living in an urban community. An overhaul of the mass transit system would appeal to younger people in this time of high gas prices and environmental concerns.

So where does infrastructure come into play?

Well, the problem with urban redevelopment is that, many times, the projects that are a part of the process get stalled in Congress or other legislatures because they are labeled as "pork." For example, John McCain is on record saying that he will pay for many of his own plans -- like reinstating Bush's tax cuts -- by eliminating the pork from Congress. And while you can already see the problem developing there, McCain adds to it by advocating for a gas tax holiday; this will eliminate the funding for many of the projects involving our nation's infrastructure, further paralyzing development (while not getting any economic benefit).

Bob Herbert wrote a terrific piece for his column in the New York Times about the importance of infrastructure and its tendency to fly under the rader due to its... unsexy... nature.

I sat in on a meeting Thursday as Mr. Diaz and several other mayors, including Michael Bloomberg of New York, met in Manhattan to discuss ways of getting the federal government involved in large-scale infrastructure and transportation initiatives. The mayors are trying to spread the message that investing in a sound infrastructure is essential for continued economic development.

This may seem obvious, but infrastructure proponents are having a terrible time getting traction on this issue. Infrastructure initiatives are expensive, and not sexy. But there are powerful returns on these investments. They tend to pay for themselves many times over (can you imagine New York City without the subways?) and the projects are job creators.

With President Bush on the way out, the burden of leading an effort to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure would fall on either Barack Obama or John McCain. Representatives of each candidate attended Thursday’s meeting but did not participate.

The mayors talked about clogged highways, the high price of gasoline and an air transportation system that seems to get more pitiful by the day. Mayor John Robert Smith of Meridian, Miss., called on the presidential candidates to take a bold, creative approach to the nation’s transportation needs, including substantial investments in railroad infrastructure.

Mr. Smith believes the nation should devote the same level of commitment to developing a first-rate passenger rail system as was marshaled for the interstate highway system in the Eisenhower era.

My whole point in writing about this issue today is to articulate the link between progress for the future (and we have to look at what Millennials will want, since, according to the Washington Business Journal article, they'll be 30% of the population and transitioning to homeowner status by 2012) with the need for infrastructure. Bob Herbert is right -- it's not an attractive issue to talk about, just like it's not fun to sit in construction delays on a highway, but placed in context, it's crucial for our future.

We could have vibrant communities, with small grocery stores, coffeehouses, laundry facilities, movie theaters, drug stores, and apartments all included. We could have a state-of-the-art mass transit system linking these communities in many of our urban areas. We could have a light rail highway set up in the mold of the Eisenhower highway system. But without a focus on infrastructure, none of this will get off the ground.

In keeping with my post earlier this week about the need for more investment in communications work within youth organizing, I want to point you all to a 1170 word profile of Television producer/major donor Norman Lear and his youth vote organization Declare Yourself.

Here are the main messages coming out of the piece:

Declare Yourself, which Mr. Lear founded in 2003 to spur 18- to 29-year-olds to vote, strives to register more than two million people by Election Day. A nonprofit organization, it registered about a million voters in the months leading up to the 2004 election, most of them that October, said Aviva Rosenthal, the organization’s director of partnerships.

...

Four years ago Declare Yourself was simply one of many voter-registration efforts, admirable but probably without huge impact.

Message: 1 million voters is "not a significant impact" and by implication, youth in general did not have a huge impact in 2004.

Young people could be more crucial in the presidential race this time around — they played a bigger role than normal in many primary contests, and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has the trappings of a youth crusade. Thus organizations like Declare Yourself are taking on extra weight.

Message: Youth organizations weren't important until Barack Obama showed up. We didn't make him, he made us.

Rival registration efforts abound, but Declare Yourself is perhaps alone in using big media (anything controlled by the five largest media conglomerates) as its primary sales tool. Rock the Vote, which rose to prominence in the 1992 election by teaming up with MTV, comes close with its emphasis on musicians, but it has started relying more heavily on Internet outreach than on television.

This is bizarrely wrong. I would say that Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself are equally partnering with major media corporations. Both organization's biggest program this year involves online voter registration. If anything, Rock the Vote is the more innovative of the two organizations with new ways to using it's corporate and celebrity partnerships to increase registration. In reading the piece, however, the implication is that Declare Yourself's strategy is in some way superior.

Message: Corporate partnerships and Media are more important than internet outreach.

Mr. Lear toils to line up celebrities who have cachet among young adults. Through his wide-ranging contacts, he has corralled a roster of stars popular with young people to plug the cause, including America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”), Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”) and Tyra Banks (“America’s Next Top Model”). He said that he was trying to sign up the Jonas Brothers.

One of Declare Yourself’s biggest coups involved the MTV reality series “The Hills.” Mr. Lear and Ms. Rosenthal arranged for a star of that show to mention the registration effort during filming. As it turned out, producers liked the story line so much that they devoted the bulk of an episode to registering to vote.
...
Citing internal research, Marc Morgenstern, executive director of Declare Yourself, said 83 percent of the people the organization registered in 2004 voted. “Yes, young people are assaulted with messages,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “That is why we have an overlapping approach. The cumulative impact gets them to the tipping point.”

Message: Celebrities and media campaigns are the best way to reach young voters.

At the moment, though, he is most focused on Declare Yourself. Whether registration efforts reap votes is a question that the organization cannot answer with precision. And as excited as registration groups, campaigns and others get about supposedly surging interest among younger voters every four years, the gains rarely prove to be substantial. The turnout rate in the last presidential election among voters 18 to 25 was 47 percent, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 64 percent for the overall population.

Message: Young people don't vote and we have no idea how to make them vote in bigger numbers.

This piece is a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we know:

• Young Voters have turned out in larger and larger numbers for the past 3 election cycles, and we were the only age demographic to vote in favor of John Kerry.
• Peer to peer outreach is the gold standard for moving young voters to the polls and it's effectiveness has been proven.
• Celebrity campaigns in and of themselves do not increase youth turnout.
• The internet is a huge and important tool for reaching out and engaging young voters.
• Youth organizations engaged in peer to peer outreach pioneered the tactics and laid the groundwork for Obama's successful youth operation.

This New York Times profile may serve the purpose of raising the profile of Declare Yourself and Norman Lear, but it does very little to advance the goals of the growing progressive youth movement. In fact, it is actively working at cross-purposes to that movement and teaching journalists and anyone who reads it precisely the wrong lessons about youth vote outreach.

Earlier this week I wrote a post called "If the Youth Vote, Obama Wins" - Yes, But It's More Complicated, in which I tried to walk back some potentially outlandish claims about just how high youth turnout will be in November. I imagine that for a lot of you it was weird to see me, one of the biggest youth vote cheerleaders, disagreeing with such a positive description of youth potential. As I stated at the time, my purpose wasn't to say that youth wouldn't vote or turnout in record numbers, rather it was to manage expectations about what that record turnout might look like.

In 2004, youth turnout increased dramatically, but you wouldn't know it by reading the papers or watching the news. Turnout jumped by 4.3 million, from 40 to 49%. So what happened? Two things. First, the press confused "share of the electorate" with "turnout." Youth turnout rose, but share of the electorate remained steady as all age groups increased their turnout. More significantly, after months of hype about the power of the youth vote, John Kerry didn't win.

The bad youth vote narrative that emerged on November 3rd, 2004 was not just a consequence of bad reporting, it was a consequence of the failure of youth organizations to adequately manage expectations. It was P. Diddy completely dominating the political media and pumping up the youth vote without a real field operation to back up his words. It was the over-the-top rhetoric employed by so many youth organizations (myself included) about how youth would be the difference for John Kerry. In short - it was a communications failure.

Over the past 5 years, we have invested a lot of money in building leadership capacity/training programs, and field programs to engage young voters through peer-to-peer outreach. During that same time, little to no money was invested in expanding the communications capacity of partisan youth organizations. Is it any wonder it took over three years and multiple wins at the federal level (2006 midterms, 2008 primaries) to achieve even the adequate youth vote narrative currently in the media?

I subscribe to about 20 Google Alerts every day that track youth vote stories in the media. It is not a comprehensive tracking system by any means, but it gives me a good idea about what is getting discussed. Most recently, there seem to be two major storylines about young voters:

• Registration in state X are up due to increased youth registration
• Generation Gap stories, usually a variation on "will youth burn Obama at the polls" or "Obama need to focus more on older people."

Almost none of these stories mentions a progressive or non partisan youth organization as a cause of increased youth engagement, or uses a staffer from one of our organizations as a source. Of the youth vote stories that do quote an organization or use one of our people as a source, I would say that the top two stories are:

• Blurbs about Rock the Vote's Stila Lipstick
• Bits about Christina Aguilera's Rock the Vote PSA

These are not substantive stories. I don't mean to hit on Rock the Vote here - they've had some great press hits this year including a whole hour on the Larry King Live show. And bear in mind that this is a completely unscientific study, but it would seem that youth vote organizations and the progressive youth movement are not in any significant way driving the youth vote narrative during an election that may see the most significant youth participation since the passage of the 26th Amendment.

That's a problem.

The long and short is, it's time to invest in partisan communications work, not just field work, within the youth infrastructure we created these last five years. I know money is tight this cycle, but with the Obama campaign implicitly lifting the ban on independent expenditures, perhaps we'll start to see more money flow into our work. If so, it's time to invest in real media monitoring and rapid response, a larger effort to place our staffers in print and on the air, and the proper training to make sure they do a good job when they do get in the media.

It's time to take control of the story that the media and the public tell about our work.

For the past 6 months I’ve been consulting the All-Ages Movement Project (AMP), a member-driven network of community based organizations that connect young people through independent music and art. AMP connects DIY and grassroots music organizations together to make them stronger, and currently has assembled a network of 94 organizations across the country.

In this vein, I am republishing AMP's organizational spotlight series here on FM, so you can get to know a few of the estimated 200-300 orgs across the country working in the trenches- changing the lives of young people and the direction of this country by making activism and participation cool again.

Turn the Beat Around: Youth, Art and Activism at 924 Gilman

By Shannon Stewart

SPOTLIGHT ON 924 GILMAN'S PARTICIPATORY STRUCTURE

You Are Responsible for Your Participation

When you first walk into the little warehouse in front of a canning shop on Gilman Street you might, like me, stand in the middle of the room sort of awkwardly and wait for someone to ask if they can help you.

And you will stand there for a while.

The second time I did this, the back door was propped open and the sun backlit people walking in and moving around me as if I were an inanimate object rather than a curious and semi-lost looking person standing in the middle of the concrete space.

As I wondered whom I should talk to about getting on the agenda for the 924 Gilman membership meeting, some guys in clad shirts screaming band names in scratchy fonts moved nasty couches around and disturbed the mice hanging out underneath. I flinched at the sight of the urban wildlife inside and was rewarded with a couple knowing smirks. Strike one.

People meandered in. A whiteboard was slid out and propped up against some chairs with all-caps agenda items like "BOOKING" and "SECURITY." We were 12 people: mostly male, mostly wearing all-black clothing. One person was putting trucks on a new skate deck.

Ben, the facilitator, pushed his thick black glasses up the bridge of his nose and pulled a pen out of the front pocket of his plaid button up shirt. "OK, let's get started. First of all, does anyone have anything they would like to add to the agenda?" There were a few retorts back, and then he says, " OK, well how about you go first then?" I looked up from my notes to find 11 mostly disinterested sets of eyes focused on me, seemingly sizing me up. I passed around a few copies of my case-study proposal. I knew that every major decision at Gilman is passed through membership.

After a few questions about my proposal, Mike asked if anyone "wanted to vote" on whether or not they approved of Gilman's participatory structure being written about. Even though every decision has to go through membership, not everything is voted on, and in this case, no one piped up. This struck me as such a no-brainer way to keep every decision from seeming process-heavy as they normally do in collective settings.

The conversation then moved on to a lengthy discussion about creating a new "head of security" position and formulating the best strategy for working with the city in dealing with noise complaints.

Three years ago, in the wake of the 2004 election, we all had a sense that something was wrong with our democracy.

After Barry Goldwater's ignominous defeat in 1964 the conservatives had gotten organized and by 1980 were on the warpath. Since that day, it seemed, progressives had been stumbling around blindly -- either trying to obfuscate the debate, looking like wusses, or eagerly helping conservatives to undo all the progress of a fifty-year national consensus Roosevelt had begun with the New Deal.

In those heady days, Howard Dean had showed grassroots activism could counter the traditional conservative individual-donor advantage, the Rappaports were getting folks together and Rob Stein was on the road with his famous powerpoint, the Center for American Progress was forming, and works like Don't Think of an Elephant and the Death of Environmentalism essay were making the case that single-issue advocacy wasn't enough to fundamentally shift American values. Words like infrastructure, values, ideas, media, and think tanks were the bread and butter of the progressive lexicon.

At the time, I had just returned from leading a group of 135 Stanford students to knock on doors and turn out John Kerry voters in Nevada. After catching up on some long-overdue homework in a diner in Las Vegas on November 3, I returned back to my dorm room in Crothers Hall -- literally in the phallic shadow of Hoover tower -- to think about what was next.

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At the base of that tower is a plaque explaining that it is the only federal monument to president Herbert Hoover. Small wonder. Though Hoover's ideas -- that Americans would be better without "communistic" programs like like Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FDIC -- had been seen as widely discredited by the 1932 election and the subsequent success of the New Deal, in that one lonely tower the spark had apparently been kept alive. Now, re-popularized by organizations like the Hoover Institution, we saw plausible efforts to take apart Social Security and gut the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If organizations like Hoover had restored the dream of a do-nothing government presiding over the economic ruin of middle class America, it was clear that we needed a "Roosevelt Institution" to bring back America's problem-solving spirit.

Fellow Philly blogger and local activist Susie Madrak, aka the Suburban Geurrilla and former Press Secretary for mayoral hopeful Tom Knox, had a post last week about the death of another Philly blogger: Rittenhouse Review’s Jim Capozzola. Susie is obviously extremely sad at the loss of her friend, but she's also really pissed:

There is not even a little doubt in my mind that, if Rittenhouse Review’s Jim Capozzola had remained a Republican, he’d be alive now. He would have been in a well-paid think tank job, living the high life. (He did, after all, have a masters degree in foreign policy.) Most importantly, he would have had health insurance for the past six years.

And what did his talent and dedication get him on the liberal side of the political noise machine? Some free books. A life that, as intellectually stimulating as it was, reduced him to living on the charity of strangers.

People saying really kind and thoughtful things about how important he was to the cause - after he’s dead. Isn’t that ironic?

The current state of progressive politics is all kinds of FUBAR. I myself just became insured again a few months back, due to my wife getting a job with benefits, but most activists and bloggers don't have a spouse they can get insurance through, so most go through life with, as Susie called it, the sword of Damocles hanging over their head every single day.

The few months that I went without insurance put so much stress on my relationship, that under other circumstances might have ended it. It also could have landed me in debtors prison if anything would have happened to either of us, but luckily, and with the help of a few family and friends with access to medicine (I have asthma, which requires pretty constant maintenance) we made it through. Which is to say that I am lucky. But a movement, if this is in fact a movement, can not rely upon the individual luck of all of its members if it is going to remain viable.

Whether we are talking about the "free" work that bloggers do for the party and movement, or the sweat and tears that activists pour into making political change a reality, the time for change is NOW. There are certainly a few donors who continue to fund what I feel is the movement, but most of the money being funneled into political communications still goes to the same G-d damned thing: 30 second ads. At the same time, most of the large Democratic organizations that have field operations continue to outsource them to the predatory PIRGs and PIRG clone Grassroots Campaigns, Inc.

If the party wont help to insure that its own toiling proletariat, than how can we honestly put any hope in the idea that they can or will help working people on the whole. I am now 100% convinced that the next major step in this movement must be for its workers to come together and form a union. I have become convinced that only after our own workers are organized and have successfully pushed for reforms of our institutions and party towards supporting their own heart, mouth, mind, feet, and hell, even soul, will we start to see the broader societal level changes that we all demand.

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, a home-grown non-profit that trains, mobilizes, and elects new progressive leaders in Montana.

When Forward Montana started back in 2004, we were an all-volunteer operation. At the beginning, we also thought it likely that we would stay that way. The core group had skills -- raising big checks was not one of them.

So we worked in coalition to move from youth voter turnout by phones to using doors instead. And then we launched a giant confirmation battle targeting the student member of the board of regents and won -- something that hadn't been done in 20 years, much less by a volunteer operation.

There's an energy to volunteer operations, including campus groups, where people who aren't making any money feel empowered to make the decisions regarding what the organization does. Strangely enough, getting staff can almost kill that initiative. When you're all going broke for the love of it, there's solidarity. When people start getting paid, it's easy to establish unnecessary hierarchies and for others to assume that the people getting paid can get the work done.

I have to run to North Jersey for a birthday, but I wanted to quickly point to two articles, which paint a depressing picture of the possibilities of politics as a profession as well as the reasons why some political groups excel while others fail.

First, there's an article in the latest issue of In These Times called When College Ends, So Does Activism: Why selling out is a depressingly rational choice for many graduates. Here's a bit from the article:

Because of the growing cost of college, these tiring, low-paying gigs or unpaid internships are increasingly inadequate options for left-leaning graduates. With state and federal legislators redirecting funds away from universities, college tuition has outpaced family income for the past 15 years and inflation for the past 30 years.

The burden of payment has also been shifted to the students. Loans have replaced interest-free grants as the most common form of recompense, resulting in a system whereby the average student today, according to the Center for American Progress, graduates with debt almost three and a half times that of graduates just 10 years ago. “The typical student is leaving with about $19,000 dollars in student loan debt,” says Tamara Draut, author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead. “And that is going to create a financial pinch when they get their first job.”

Health care is another concern. A 2006 Commonwealth Fund study found that since 2000, 2.5 million people between the age of 19 and 29 lost healthcare coverage, bringing the grand total of uninsured 20-somethings to 14 million. Among the lucky few who can pay for and get through college, 40 percent will lose their familial coverage after graduation, with under-funded organizations unlikely to pick up the costs of employer-based healthcare.

These financial burdens disproportionately affect students of color and those from less secure economic backgrounds, whose need for job stability is generally more pressing than that of their classmates. “It’s always been hard to attract class diversity in the progressive movement. It’s largely been dominated by people who have family backgrounds that enable them, for whatever reason, to take a lower salary, particularly if they are just starting out,” says Draut. “I think the problem is that now it’s become even more challenging.” All of these factors lead even the most socially conscious graduates away from progressive politics toward less-fulfilling career fields.

This is precisely the position I find myself in, as do many/most of the people who I know who want to work in politics as a career. It seems almost completely undoable for those of us without trust funds and health care.

The next article reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks back with a girl who comes from a very wealthy background. I was talking about how I don't know if I can stay in politics because I cannot risk being without health care again. Her response was "Oh, I could never go without healthcare". Well, duh, for some of us it isn't a choice.

Anyway, the other article focuses on the group Generation Engage, whom I don't really know much about, but which is run by the kids of a few well-to-do politicos, and which surprise, surprise, has no problems getting funded or getting other politicians to work with them.

The discussion between Gore in his Nashville, Tenn., home and youth groups in New York, California and North Carolina was arranged by Generation Engage, a nonprofit group trying to get more young people involved in politics. It was founded by Talbott and his brother Devin, sons of Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott, as well as Justin Rockefeller, son of Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).

...

But bringing young people into the corridors of power is only part of the equation for Talbott. Equally important are the monthly "ambassadors meetings" with young adults that the group sponsors in all of its locations.

"We can't just be a roadshow, or it won't work," Talbott said.

Generation Engage has an annual operating budget of just more than $1 million, a full-time staff of nine and offices in the Washington area, New York, Virginia and North Carolina.

The rapid growth of the organization, founded after the 2004 elections, has opened it up to criticism that the founders' family ties helped its rapid rise. But Rockefeller says, "I don't play the 'son-of-Jay' card."

Talbott acknowledged that when they first started, they were treated "like a couple of kids trying to get attention," but he said that now "the model is working on its own."

I don't want this to seem like I'm criticizing Generation Engage for what they are doing, because from what I can tell it seems like a good organization. But saying "I don't play the son of Jay--who just happens to be from one of the richest families in the nation and, oh yeah, a Senetor--card" strikes me as pretty silly. Of course you play the son-of-Jay card, because you are the son-of-Jay card. I don't know if that's good or bad, on the whole, but I do know that the fact that only well-to-do and well-connected politicos are making it in this "movement" is a big problem

My most recent MyDD posting.

Reading Jared's post about Mitt Romney's latest fundraising gimmick and this post about how the campaign finance system is bad for young people has got me thinking broadly about the role of young voters as donors in our political system.

I don't have a grand thesis, but there are a couple of dynamics that are in play that are worth exploring, I think, as well as some long-term questions that should be posed.  This is especially relevant with the 2nd Quarter fundraising deadline being just around the corner, and in light of new FaceBook applications capable of raising cash for 501 organizations (and soon PACS and Campaigns) presumably from young people.  Here it goes.

Conventional wisdom says that young people don't have a lot of scratch to throw at political campaigns, yet I expect that when all is said and done, young people will have donated quite a bit of money to the efforts of our top candidates.  All though they have not yet released figures, the Obama campaign has already suggested that one of the largest donor blocks to the campaign (online) is students.  I know that in 2004 Dean was the first candidate I ever gave to ($50), and Obama seems to have that magic and more with young voters.  I'm guessing that by November 2008, young people will have donated at least in the high millions to low tens of millions to the Democratic presidential candidates. I hope (and encourage) the Obama campaign to release some data on this so we can start to get a baseline about just how much young people are donating this cycle.

Conventional wisdom also states that young people do not financially support the organizations that are dedicated to engaging them in politics.   Speaking from personal experience, and after talking to the Executive Directors of a number of youth organizations, this is a true statement that presents a rather large problem for the long-term sustainability of the infrastructure built by the [dot]org Boom that has revitalized progressive youth politics.  

Thus far, the new progressive youth movement has been funded by a cadre of mega-donors like the Rapaports and Lewis family and a few foundations like OSI.  In many instances though, this funding is contingent on these organizations progressing along a path to sustainability.  In order to do that, they need to build membership and expand their donor base.  At some point, that will require that young people contribute directly (donations, membership) or indirectly (purchasing some sort of fundraising premium, special event attendance) to the organizations in which they participate.

Recently, there are new developments that may point towards a solution to that problem.  

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, a youth-directed non-profit that trains, mobilizes, and elects a new generation of progressive leadership in good ol' MT.

Jake Thorn wrote earlier of the ideal way to organize on Facebook

A temporary group, geared for a short-term purpose, action-oriented, discarded as soon as the group’s goal has been accomplished.

The unfortunate part of this statement is that it is a self-reinforcing "doom loop" that exacerbates one of the most difficult aspects of organizing Millenials.

Anyone who works with young voters knows the difficulty of building identification with an organization. At Forward Montana, we have our own members and interns regularly ask, "What are you guys doing next?" The notion of ownership, membership, and involvement is a bit foreign. And this makes the task of building infrastructure insanely difficult.