 We put it on the internet, so be aware. We at Digital Natives, one of the things we look at is how young people are being civically engaged, particularly on an online space. So we are particularly excited to have Allison Fine here presenting social citizens, millennial activism, and the connected age. Allison is a social entrepreneur and writer dedicated to helping grassroots organizations and activists successfully implement social change efforts. She's a senior fellow in the democracy team at Demos, a network for change and action in New York City, where she researches and writes about the future of social change and civic engagement in this new digital age. Allison's also the author of the book, Momentum, Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, which was the winner of the Terry McAdams National Book Award and was published in 2006 by Wiley & Sons. And here at Berkman, we're celebrating our 10th anniversary. This May, 15th and 16th is the conference in Gala, so registered at Berkman at 10.org. And we're also giving away $50,000, so nominate people that are eligible for the Berkman Award on our website. With that, I'll turn it over. Do we want to do an introduction? Oh, yeah, if everybody could just go around and briefly introduce. Can I start? Yes. Robert Harris Berkman Center. You've been practicing that, huh? Yeah, right, yeah. For more years than you could imagine would. Stuart Comstock, yeah, I work at Demos. Back at Tabasco, Berkman Center. Scott Sider, School of Education. Katherine Bracey, Berkman Center. Aaron Chod, UC Berkman Center. Becky Lai, Houston, Herbert County School. Tim Long, I'm a non-president. John Clibbage, your fellow Berkman Sider. And they also are Berkman's fellow. Amarash, your Berkman Sider. Maya Marshall, Berkman Inter. Oliver Goodnought, Berkman Center. Oliver Baden, Harvard Law School. I'm Harry Lewis. I'm a computer science professor here at Berkman Fellow. Where is that line? Josh Goulds, Dean Fletcher School and Berkman Center. William Horkman, Harvard Law School. Dr. McGeal, a fellow at the Center. Tuna Chatterjee, a fellow at the Center. Jane Koo, also a fellow. Pablo Bocchese, Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology. Kevin Korsniewski, Harvard Law School. What an interesting array of folks. Allison Fine, nice to be here today. Mostly I'm delighted that it's not an April Pools joke by Amar who invited me, so I'm glad that we're here. I wanted to talk to you today about a paper I've just finished for the Case Foundation. That's the Family Foundation of Steve and Jean Case. They wanted me to take a look at the intersection of millennials, and we define millennials as 15 to 29 year olds for lots of different definitions out there. Or in other words, people who went to college with laptops. That's how you'll know who they are. And their intersection with social causes. Momentum was a broad look at the social sector writ large and how it needs to move to adopt to the new web 2.0 world, the new digital world. But this was a narrow review of what is actually is happening just in this realm of young people, technology, and social change. And just to give you a quick overview, I want to talk a little bit about the millennials and why they're so important. A little bit about the cause society that we're living in, which is very important. And when you put the two together, we came up with something that I call a social citizen that is somebody who cares passionately about causes, is very immersed in the technology and has a totally different view of their role in a larger community than traditional citizens would have and say a greatest generation of citizenship would have. So millennials are important because they are enormous. There are over 70 million of them. They outnumber the living boomers, which takes people a bit by surprise. They are, as you know, as we all know through the digital natives program here, they are immersed in technology, fluent in it, born to it, not every single one, but largely. And they're living immersively. By that, we mean that they are fluidly moving from online spaces to online spaces, taking their social networks with them and using tools in both places to connect themselves to peers, to information. And from my perspective, what was important was to causes as well. Now, we know that they're multitasking, and Miriam and I were just chatting before, that it's very easy if you didn't grow up that way with 14-i-am windows open and emailing and chatting all at one time. It can look a little dispiriting and a little dizzying. But I think our challenge, particularly as people who are trying to make sense of this new world, our challenge is to look at it as the way the world is going, not as a good or bad thing, not to put our values on it, but simply to say, this is how young people are living. And it's affecting what they do and how they do it. But just as importantly as multitasking is what I would call their multi-context view of the world as well. So using the same tools and the same energy blended throughout their life, kind of striated throughout their life, are all the different worlds that they're living in and all the different areas of that world that they're living in. So for instance, they're doing their school work and they have their school networks. And at the same time, they're immersed in entertainment culture, which is a good thing. I'm not opposed to that. And at the same time, they're immersed in their own social world and in causes, all using the same tools. Now something very interesting that I learned through my research, and this came from a scholar at UC Santa Barbara named Jennifer Earl. She's working on what you call social movement societies. It's that you find that they're using the tools of democracy to in all of these different contexts. So they're organizing tools to make their voices heard in schools and on campuses. They are protesting the decisions that entertainment companies are making. So they're petitioning and using protest tools and emailing and boycotting and bycotting. All of these wonderful tools of democracy, which is to say that we may not see them engaged in demonstrating on the steps of the capital right now, but it doesn't mean that they're divorced from how to engage democratically, which I think is very, very important for our future. And the last thing about millennials that I found really, really interesting was how drawn they are to corporations as consumers. There are large consumers. They are very comfortable in expressing themselves with corporations of how they want corporations to behave, the fact that they want to buy from socially responsible corporations. I was just saying before, the label socially responsible has become to me a little bit like organic food in that just about anything fits under it right now. I'm not quite sure where the parameters are anymore, but buying something where either that something was made in a healthier way or that that company gives back in some way, say, a Ben and Jerry's or the red campaign that so many corporations joined are likely to draw millennials to them. And that's very, very important because what's left out of the equation, so they're drawn to their social networks. They're drawn to causes. They're drawn to corporations. They are not drawn to government and public policy. And this is very important. We do see, and it's possible we're in the midst of a sea change of engagement politically that's starting with the presidential campaign this year. We're seeing a surge in young voters. However, to date, we don't know how the story is going to end, but to date, we know that young people are drawn to campaigns, whether it's advocacy campaigns or increasingly political campaigns. That's still not the same as understanding and participating in the development of public policy and in the running of government. Those are still very different things. So that's who millennials are. Why don't we talk for a little bit, just for a second, about the cause society. So we are living in a society that is immersed, I call it, marinating in causes. You cannot go anywhere. I was in several airports last week. You can't go in an airport. You can't go in a mall. You can't walk down a street. You can't open up a newspaper without seeing some cause that we're supposed to give to, click for, connect to, donate to, volunteer for. From our very first immersion into schools, through schools, in congregations, in companies, in corporations, throughout our lives, there are causes. It's a reflection of the fact that the number of nonprofits have almost doubled in the last 15 years. The amount being given to nonprofits by individuals and foundations has exploded at the same time. And the third leg of the cause society is the fact that we have taken out civic education from public schools and inserted volunteerism and serving law. This is now the de facto way of defining citizenship in many ways, although these are largely private activities, which is very interesting. So you take one of the most cardinal examples of causes of the last 15 years is a Susan Coman race for the cure. This has been a magnificent example of bringing awareness to a cause of breast cancer, involving millions of people as runners and participants and fundraisers. They have donated billions of dollars to breast cancer research, but here's the difference. Old school activism or advocacy, that money would have been public money going to NIH for research. Coman is investing in private research. So we've privatized advocacy, and in that case, public health research as well, which is a really interesting idea. So you put all these pieces together, and we have millions of young people walking around as what I would call social citizens. These are people who view their sense of participation in communities larger than themselves, in issues larger than themselves, solely through this cause lens, leaving out government and public policy. They understand the need on, say, Facebook to connect to a cause and to friend for causes, to fundraise for causes. But here, the model takes a right or a left turn, a different turn away from traditional advocacy and activism. My background is as an evaluator of social cause efforts. And what happens in those and evaluating advocacy efforts is a very linear, very traditional manufacturing model. So you have inputs and activities. Those are the things that are going on in an effort, and they result in outputs. Maybe the number of people who participated in a cause and outcomes and impact what happened as a result. Traditionally for advocacy, the outcomes and impact are around public policy development. To date, when we're watching social citizens, particularly on online, participate in advocacy efforts, the end result is around process. It's around raising awareness and having people participate. It is not about public policy. So based on all of that, I have questions that I came out of this effort with, which I guess is a really good thing, because it means that it's both nascent. It's all brand new thinking. And it's interesting. We have things to ponder, which is good. Means none of us are out of work, which is even better. So the first area that I'm intrigued by, and if you ask me more about it, the answer is probably, gee, I don't know. It's so nascent. So I expect that as an answer. Is this idea of having a citizenry that excludes public policy from its thinking about public solutions? And again, I don't want to define it as a good thing or a bad thing. Just we know to date, young people have not been included in decision making with government. They have difficulty having access to it. Dana Boyd writes eloquently about that. And so the lens that they look at for social change excludes public policy, which is important. The second issue that's very important is we know that connecting through social networks, particularly online, is a way of creating an identity and acculturating oneself for young people. The question, though, is for very difficult public problems, we're going to need to connect across these bubbles. And that is very difficult to do. I don't know that it can be done solely online. Probably needs an online component to it. But we really have not figured out good ways of combining those efforts to efficiently and effectively bring people with disparate points of view together to problem solve. And the last issue is the fact that these efforts are so nascent and are so fundamentally different than activism and advocacy from last century. And I think they deserve and require new measures and new measurement systems to go along with it. And again, I don't know exactly what those are, but I think they're worth pursuing. So I know that the intent of the lunch is to have a conversation. And I'm going to leave off right there and join you to converse with me. Thank you. Anybody? Hi. I'm sorry. I think it's a little bit more about the methods that you used. Is there any sort of conclusions that you drew? But I didn't get a sense of sort of what the best bolts of study were. Yeah, it was largely qualitative. It was the core of it is about 30 in-depth interviews that I had with both key influential people who've been thinking and writing about this, as well as millennial activists who were very, very interesting in their view of the world. And then there's the world after this. Ben Retre, who started change.org, was one. Thaddeus Ferber, who runs the Youth Pack, is another. I've just lost this. Adrian Talbot, who started Generation Engage, is another. And there were several more like that. So these are young people who have started activist efforts largely online, who brought a very different and interesting perspective to it. And then there was a literature review as well that went with the study. Yeah, hi, Jane. Hi. My partner runs a grassroots organization which, by the definition of the Kate Foundation, is primarily comprised of millennials, 20-something folks. She and I are both not in that category. And the kind of folks she works with are mostly evangelical Christians. And so for a while, she had attributed this kind of aversion to policy to that factor rather than to their age. So I find that really interesting. And that maybe it's actually not just their evangelical makeup, although evangelicals do have more of a spitting of public policies than other religious groups are not religious groups. But I'm curious, if in your research you, a lot of the amount of activism presumes kind of progressive activism, which actually her group is. But there are also a lot of young people who are engaged in what you might call conservative causes or whatever. I'm curious if we're finding bands of ideological spectrums. Yeah, they do. We were trying not to just be left leaning, although there's an awful lot of activity happening on the left. One thing I found very interesting about millennials as a group, and of course, it's a generalization. But as a group, I didn't find them to be very ideological. They're not at the extremes. They're idealistic, which is very different. They strongly believe that they can and will make a difference in this world. But that difference is going to come from a hammer in their hand. It's not going to come at a ballot box. They're also very different from boomers in particular. You know, I'm a Gen Xer. We don't really have a characteristic. So I'll talk about the boomers. Boomers in particular in that boomers have a relationship to government. It's mostly that they dislike it, right? That's what they were protesting in the 60s about, was they were protesting against government. In the research out of Circle at the University of Maryland, Peter Levine has done a tremendous amount of research in looking at the political affiliation of young people and their feelings about government. And what he found, which is really interesting, was they're not against government. They're not particularly for it, either. They're sort of neutral in the middle. They just don't have a relationship with it, which is actually an opportunity. For people who do think it's important that they think about and affect public policy, the opportunity is that we don't have to start from a negative. We do have to engage and educate and inform and activate. But at least we don't have to overcome an enormous amount of skepticism or cynicism. That's not what the issue is. So I think with your partner working with evangelicals and whether it's an evangelical issue or a millennial issue, I think there is a core of people who frankly have never seen government work particularly well at a local or national level and have just closed it off as an option. Because where they have been successful is they have clicked on causes. They have run for causes. They have bought from green companies. And they see that working. It's right in front of them and it's instant. I want to go back to what the difference you made between ideological and idealistic. And one of the ways in which I think that difference plays out is also in terms of group orientation and individual orientation. So with ideology, it seems that people can get behind some ideology and move together. But in your paraphrasing of idealistic, you said I believe I can make a difference. And that seems a bit more individualistic. So did you see those kinds of different orientations playing out as well? I think that is just right. I think that their understanding of how they make a difference is individualistic. They are happy to work with other people on causes but don't necessarily see that as a community of people as opposed to if they had a view that the government needed to work very differently and how you would need to mobilize voters and protesters to do that, that would be a very different sort of engagement. I think my comment about ideological also references the fact that they are not radical in any way. They're very happy to participate in this free economy. They want to start businesses that are socially responsible. So they're not 1930s socialists and communists. They're very mainstream in the causes and issues they take. Is there any reason to think that some of this has to do with their loss of patience with the written work, is to say ideologies and radical philosophies and so on have traditionally emerged from things people write that get people fired up and then you sort of struggle to carry through the consequences and some people that carry them to carry them through. So I'm very struck by the thing you said at the beginning, which never occurred to me, although I've observed it. Now that you say it, it's obviously true. Which is always the, I say that in order to give you some credit for observing it, that civic education has been replaced by volunteerism. And the same thing that fits, that the way the idealism has displaced the ideology is to sort of individuate the relation with social cause rather than kind of, dare I say it, think about it. That's maybe too harsh, but we got to get the juices flowing in the room here a little bit. You were so wonderfully dispassionated and balanced in your presentation. And so I wonder if this is in any way related to some of the sort of attention deficit phenomena that you also alluded to at the beginning that kids don't spend their time being forced to read things and think hard about where the arguments take them and they just want to jump in and are now able to. That's the democratizing force of the tools that they now have available, which people have used to have. Well, I have a series of reactions. The first being, of course, that I constantly tell my children that anything I say is obviously true. And it doesn't seem to go over so well there, but I'm glad you agree. I think that what I saw in the research was that these are children, millennials are children of boomers. And they grew up hearing this story about. I don't know if I know them actually. Do you? Yeah. OK. They're all lovely. I don't know if that's an expression. Wonderful. They grew up hearing stories about protests, many of which ultimately didn't work. And what I read about was this feeling of, well, that's the way that you tried it. We're not going to do it that way, right? Because you were out in the streets and you didn't actually stop the war. And you were trying to change the side in this very radical and ideological way. And that didn't work. And you gave up. And so I'm going to do this differently. I'm going to find causes that speak to my heart. And I'm going to pick up a hammer. And I'm going to go to these places. This is huge, too. I want to go to these places. And I want to go to New Orleans. I want to go to Guatemala. I want to go and see it and feel this change, the difference that I'm making with people. And I don't know that that can be ascribed to just having an attention deficit. And I don't know also that it's entirely fair to put the onus just on young people for rethinking democracy and government as well. Stu? I want to pick up on some of the same points. There must be a generational thing. We resonated with some of the same things. But your point about replacing civic education with volunteerism was also the point that probably struck me most in the whole thing. And that's not just the millennials saying, we want to behave differently. It's the boomers saying, we're going to teach you differently than we were taught. And so what's the message about that? That the boomers have said, all that stuff about civic education, we're not going to teach you about government. We're not going to make you learn the details about the muck and mire of how government functions and doesn't function. We're going to do something that's easy. And so I'd love to teach that. I don't think we should shy away from the fact that there's a political component to that as well. Public school systems do not want to be in a position of teaching things that might blow up in their faces. And some of that is government and politics. So it's much safer to teach about habitat for humanity. It's a much safer political place to be that the Board of Ed is not going to have 1,500 people the next meeting protesting for them as well. So I think this is a complex mix of politics, of boomer passions around what worked and what didn't work, that as you're saying, which is correct, has trickled down and has created a generation for whatever reason is distant from public policy and government. They have no connection to it whatsoever. So one of the things that we found in our focus groups was actually some pessimism towards what a Facebook cause really does. It's kind of a low, very eventful that you just have to click to do it. And so what does it really mean? And I know that's a question that we struggle a lot with here. And what I hear you saying is that where it really means something is either with donating money or donating time. And so my question there is kind of the thing about voting is that everybody gets to do it. To donate money or time, you have to have a certain amount of resources available to you. So what happens to those millennials that don't have the ability to participate in that way? Well, I think that causes on Facebook, we were talking about this earlier today, I think is this just enormously interesting new way of interacting. Because it brings all of these pieces together in one place. And again, so, nascent, we really don't know what all of it means. But one thing in millennials' favor in regards to the causes on Facebook is that it is very easy to participate doing the one thing that millennials feel is their commerce. Their commerce is the social network. And by connecting their friends to causes, they are being effective in their own view of what success is. So that issue of raising awareness for causes, blogging about them, or putting it up on one's wall on Facebook about being a media voice for causes is immediately available, is at no cost to every millennial, and is a heck of a lot easier. Stu can attest it is a heck of a lot easier than registering and voting in an awful lot of places in America. So I think part of what I was saying this morning is what I really don't want to do is take the evaluative frameworks that are used on land, particularly for advocacy, and just transcribe them online. Because I think that this new activity is so different. It really is deserving of new measures, new frameworks. And I don't even want to start with an idea of what that is, because I think we just really need to watch it and feel it and talk to the participants more to figure it out. I mentioned an example this morning. The Case Foundation funded over the holidays something called America's Giving Challenge. And they did this on the Parade Magazine website and on Facebook using causes. And the challenge was for the causes that raised the most money online, the Case Foundation would give awards, either $1,000 for the group that raised the most money in a day for every day of the challenge. And then I think it was $50,000 to the ultimate winner. What was really fascinating was I have been in the cause and nonprofit space for a long time, longer than I want to admit. And I had never heard of the top 10 winners of this. These were mainly groups that had no staff, also groups that, until the challenge, didn't even have a Facebook presence. So it's not as if they were particularly facile on Facebook. And somehow, through the nature of this challenge and the nature of their social networks, they did phenomenally well, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars this way. And I have no idea why. I have no idea why those groups were an amnesty and a habitat very poorly. And these groups, no one had ever heard of who had no staff, no budget, did phenomenally well. So one of those organizations in the top 10 was started by a friend of mine. And part of what we've discussed about this is how would he do in the next round, because now he's known, or now his organization is known. And it's becoming bigger. It sort of tips over that point of, this is my body. And he started this thing that's really cool. So what does he say? Why would he successful in the first round? What's that? Why was he successful in the first round? What does he think? I mean, I think a lot of it is just the social networks. This is my friend. He's really awesome. This is this really cool organization. He started, and they really need your help. So what happens? Is it going to be a total turnover the next time it happens? And it goes back to what I was saying about group orientation versus individual orientation. People want to get on the cool new thing and help out my body versus this is a cause that I really, in and of itself, believe in. I don't find that surprising. I mean, we all know amnesty. And if we wanted to give amnesty money, we'd done it already for them to say, hey, we need extra money right now. Hurry, hurry is not as compelling as someone who comes up with a new idea, a new cause and says, I have a new approach to do. I have a few more. But it's also you're going to give your body $5 the first time when they come back next time. You're going to say, I did this last year. I did this. And I don't really like you. They don't know. I didn't care about the cause. I was doing it because my friend sent you the link. Right. Did she just do that run for cancer with us? Have they solved that whole cancer thing? I think it is some mixture of these things going on. That's very interesting and new. I'm from Argentina. Right now we're having a protest because the government raised the export tax on soybean. And the first question I have for you is when you mentioned the hammer, right now no one is doing anything online around the conflict in Argentina. The internet might as well not exist. Things would be exactly the same. The farmers are stopping trucks on routes because they don't want the food to get to the cities. And government is paying people to get the farmers to not let them stop the trucks. So it's a very feudal, medieval way of doing things. And as I say, the internet has no role or checked some Facebook groups. And they're really pitiful as far as numbers and adherence compared to the whole country spending on what this guy, Jean-Bia, is from the rural confinerations and the lady president that we have are saying over the media. And so the internet is not existing. So what is the role of the hammer? When you mention the hammer, they want to do it with a hammer. What do they do with a hammer without using any subterfuges? Do they go smashing windows with a hammer, killing people? No, no. When I was referring there, and well, and let me be clear about the focus of my work for this paper was US focused. So what I was referring to there was the natural inclination of young people to want to be hands-on volunteers for a cause more than participate in discussions of public policy or participating in government. So that was the distinction that I was making. I don't know that it translates that way overseas Bruce would know better than I in that regard. You don't know either. OK. I'm glad we're on the same page. Just to say, man, I guess I think two things that contribute to the way in which the millennials differ dramatically from previous generations are the way in which they think about two social mechanisms. And I guess I think one is the market. I guess I think that the millennial generation believes more strongly in the market than previous generations. And I mean, they're not interested in, you know, they cite their parents as role models. Like they're not interested in tearing things down. Right. You know, there's a tremendous, and I think that the activism you describe is all very entrepreneurial. Right. Like, and it's not saying let's fundamentally shift the way in which we allocate resources or it's not sort of from an injustice framework. It's from a, you know, how can we sort of use the market to operate more? It's a lot of leveraging going on. Like I find it very interesting that that Kiva organization, if I'm saying its name right, you know is can't keep up with the number of people who want to, which is sort of a micro-finance organization. That's right. Small loans. Like they can't keep up with the number of people who want to donate to that organization. And I think you speak to something very interesting that's going on that is spearheaded by young people, which is the blending of the for-profit and the nonprofit sectors. Right. So change.org and razu.com are for-profit enterprises. Kiva is a non-profit. There would be no way to know when you're just looking at them online. Lots of young people are starting socially responsible businesses that in another era would have looked close to nonprofits or starting nonprofits that have revenue streams. So there is this very interesting blending that's going on that at some point, some of my colleagues have said the government probably needs to step in and readdress the tax issue on some of this as well. I feel like I would just add to that. I guess I think there are some negative possibilities to having a generation that's so, that believes that the world is fundamentally just. Yeah. I think that there's some worry to that. Right. I think you've been waiting for long. Just to follow up on that, what the gentleman said about the misunderstanding of the term hammer is exactly the crux of the problem, right? I mean, a number of us had a really interesting conversation a few months ago with a really interesting thinker named Zach Exley. Yeah. He had, was very critical of this generation that you describe in the US and essentially saying that they're too comfortable. What you do when you build a house for habitat is doing nothing. It makes you feel good. You built that one house, but structurally, what are you doing to fight that injustice? And I think that's a really interesting strain of thought. And what's interesting about Zach is that he ended up following the, he ended up kind of starting to study the Christian right and what they're doing to socially organize, because he believed that while certain organizations on the left and universities were happy with people doing anything totally agnostic of the content of that action, a lot of people in the evangelical community actually had far more content. And I think that's, I think you'll actually see, perhaps starting to see an interesting backlash against this idea of doing something, whereas you're not necessarily having any kind of strategic impact. So there's kind of that issue as well. That's very interesting comment. Thank you. I have a question and I sort of follow up on Josh. As a consumer of these causes, Facebook, clicker, and a buyer, and all these things, I often think a lot of it is trend. And I wonder if we're going to see the bubble burst. And I think when that bubble bursts, that's one of the solution causes are the most valuable. And I'm sort of thinking that that's happening now around the election. And what you said about the election being maybe this pivot point where we might see a change in how these causes are organized or even maybe linked from the online to the online. The election is motivating people who have been linked on these causes on Facebook to actually go and do things. But then that brings me to the idea that has the percentage of the population that actually go out and do things. Has that actually radically changed than from previous generations? There are people who are entrepreneurship, entrepreneur about NGOs and so on and so forth. And maybe that's a new tool that they have nowadays and they didn't have that then. But I wonder if what's actually happened is we're seeing a lot of volume. Again, we're not seeing a lot of substance. Well, we've certainly seen a huge increase, huge and steady increase in the number of volunteers. And this, again, is reflective of the in-school mandatory volunteering programs. That is sticking for people through college and beyond. So people have gotten in the habit of volunteering and are continuing. The question of the content of that volunteering, I think, is in flux. But I do want to raise a caution in that I think of some of this as community capacity as well, that when we're engaging people to do things that speak to their heart right now and when they're facile in using the tools of democracy online, when something does happen in the future, we're going to have these people ready to be mobilized at a second's notice. So maybe it's very good news that we haven't had to mobilize in that way to this point. We haven't had a challenge of that magnitude yet. However, I think it's also good news that we would have the capacity to organize and mobilize very quickly and very efficiently if we needed to. Can you say anything about another dimension on this, which Josh's comment brings to mind, which is kind of leadership followership or leadership participation slash participation or something like that? Society that consists of lots of people who are eager to join whatever the latest, greatest thing is. But if I can use the term again, think that much about what it is that they can do to operate at a grander scale or to mobilize people themselves. That's not going to work. On the other hand, it may be exactly the opposite. That is to say that the fact that there have been these thousands of groups created may be a sign that we're getting lots more new leaders trained. I'm very familiar with the phenomenon in the college here where no self-respecting student would go through four years of Harvard without having founded a new organization. This is one of my great achievements. I was dean at one of my great achievements was actually getting the two Republican clubs to merge, not as a Republican as I'm not, but just as an exercise in instruction about how to actually make political change. So maybe that phenomenon is going on here. We're just getting lots more people who are eager to lead things. But the way most of your voiceover made it sound like it was more followership than leadership that was going on. I think that's interesting. I think what we're seeing is a tremendous amount of participation. But it's not the Wild Wild West. It still does require leadership, but it's the new style of leadership. So it's not the top down. It's not the here's what you're going to do. I don't know if folks saw Al Gore announced a new web campaign yesterday for climate. And I thought it was just appalling, I really did. We have all the solutions. Just click here, do what we tell you to do. There was no opportunity to engage people in a conversation about it or ask them for their ideas. So it requires a facilitative style of leadership that sets out goals and helps people to move there without cutting off their opportunities to self-organize and develop their own solutions. But one thing that you did mention that I think is an area of concern in the nonprofit sector, which is the access point has become, I think, too low. It's almost too easy to set up an organization. And we have too many of them out competing for funds, competing for volunteers, and competing for just space. And I think that's problematic. I do. Now, there are people out there who are saying, well, wisdom the crowds. We don't need organizations at all. And sometimes, given the number of organizations and the amount of noise they're making, I can tend to agree with them. However, we do need organizations that can provide ongoing leadership, institutional memory, research and expertise as needed, and organizing skills, and training for communities. Those things are boring. They're boring. That's why institutions have to do them, because institutions are boring. See, there's a little, again, I'm going to throw out another inflammatory word, but that nobody's used to people talk about individual and all the rest of that stuff. It's a little narcissistic, actually. Some of this, some of the tone of this, that it's all about me and my hammer. It's not about anything. It's not about principles. It's not about movements and leadership and all the rest of that. And all of that other stuff that you actually have to do to really create something enduring. It'll be interesting to see if this too can somehow be melded into the current trends. Yeah. So I was one of these narcissists when I first graduated. It was kind of the first group of people kind of post-narcotics. A reformed narcissist. There we are. Well, the interesting thing about that. Are you reformed? He's favorite form. Yeah. I don't know if I said anything about that. Oh, thank you so much. Stinger, Bristol. Yeah. The interesting thing about that is that all my colleagues who started organizations in the year and a half after 9-11 are now all consultants. Yeah. And it's because of what I just said about the habitat thing. They want scale. They want to figure out how to take that small organization that started. So that's not a bad thing. So they have to do it right. I don't actually think it is. I think they're very conscious. And I think this is something that comes like two or three years after you start these organizations and realize that you need this, is that you really want to make an impact. You need that scale. One of the things that's interesting would be to see what happens when this generation discovers that scale is government. In fact, that's what you have to do. I think there's been a terrible failure of people who ought to be defending government to do so, and a terrible failure of them to articulate the public goods problem that only government can solve. That there are problems to which the market will not give you a solution. It just never will can't won't do it. I know, I know. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But the rhetoric from the left and the right has been the government's your enemy, government's the problem, government is not. And so the fact that people aren't looking there, that you've been raised in a millennial where nobody said you had to for certain kinds of problems. And so I think that when that reemerges and it will, when people kind of rediscover, oh, if we tear all of that apart, there's certain things we just will never accomplish that they'll discover that scale. A brief story, my son, he gave a talk at school. He's a high school senior. He gave a talk at school this morning on reintegrating the importance of government and involved in politics. With that company. Oh, yeah. But it was interesting to see. I think this election is giving a lot of people a return to that, partly just because even John McCain's rhetoric is not as relentlessly anti-government as the Bush and Reagan and even the Sun and Green Clinton. Last question, though, is does the web give us a kind of a delay in that effect by providing this kind of fictive notion that we're doing it without government? And maybe in some cases actually it's non-fictive. Maybe it is doing it. But does the web, if we're asking what is the role of the web in all of this, the chatter around Facebook making people believe that, oh, we are rebuilding New Orleans. When in fact, the private efforts have been nice, but they've been insufficient to do what needs to be done. So I just throw that out as a question. Will in fact actually the process be slowed by the web or does the web as an information distributor start to get the word out in ways that will make a difference? Try building a dyke when hammered at a time. Right, right, right. I wanted to pick up on Harry. We mentioned the word movement, which I think was the first time I heard that in this conversation. And I wanted to distinguish between just any kind of activism that actually building a movement. I think we have this romantic vision of, especially the late 60s and 70s, is that being the height of getting changed in this country. But actually that was kind of when movements turned into activism and it kind of turned into just rhetoric. And I wondered it wasn't the- You know, my people you're talking about. You know, it took the civil rights movement decades of very, very careful strategic building and very slow building at that to actually get anywhere. And then you had in the late 60s the idea that you can just have protests and suddenly change will happen. And it strikes me that we're holding like the millennials up to a higher standard than any previous generation has been held to before, which is that I don't think any generation has had even a plurality of its participants actually engaged in a movement rather than activism. And because activism is so easy and everybody can do it. Building a movement requires sacrifice, skills, actual time investment, all those kinds of things. And I'm not sure that there was any golden era when everybody was involved in a movement and that we're kind of patinaing our history with like, oh, there was a time when everybody was engaged and now suddenly we're in this nadir. When I, you know, as one of Henry's students, you know, and involved in public service and there was a nadir of kind of this more movement oriented stuff. When I was in college, it was like almost no organizations on campus that were focused on actually, and they were all service oriented kind of like what you're saying about it. They were all taught to do service. Because after I graduated, suddenly you had like the all the different living wage campaigns pop up. And so it's not a, you know, it strikes me that, yes, the majority of work at all times is going to be kind of this fluff of feeling good about yourself, but that like what's more interesting to me is that there is this kind of upsurge in the actual work and even as a percentage of the total amount of stuff being done is small, I think it's a larger percentage now than it was when I was in college and in the decades preceding that as well, I'm wondering if we're holding up too high of a standard for how many people should are supposed to be engaging all this stuff. Well, certainly one thing I know for sure is that we're throwing around movement language much too easily and much too often because, you know, movements come along once in a generation and almost every advocacy group on their website right now or activism group is using movement words. I think what's very interesting is listening to Obama's language. It's laden with movement words as well, which is very attractive to people who are attracted to causes. And I think that that's purposeful, I really do. You know, I'm a data geek and so I find it really interesting to try to get down to the crux of who exactly is participating and what then are the outer concentric circles that people may not be participating but are paying attention and might be lending their good thoughts to it as well. And it's always tiny. It really is. Even as you were saying in the heyday of the 1960s, it wasn't everybody participating but it was a significant number and I think that's what we have to think about is what are these tipping points and who needs to participate, how in order to move issues along. But, you know, the interesting part of this work is that there is no one size fits all and every campaign is going to be different and every issue is gonna be organized differently. I do think it is very important to recognize that young people are drawn to campaigns not to institutions or organizations. And so if you are running an organization that is accustomed to having members and ongoing participants, you better find a new model because young people are going to come and go as campaigns and move them, which is a very different model. You can ask them to move on. They've had to struggle with that as well. I wanna pick up on this point, gentlemen mate, that part of what I wondered early in your talk, Alison, was how much of this we're not interested in government would have been answered similarly in previous generations. But the amplifier of the new technology makes it sound like everything has changed when there may be a heavy generational aspect to this and I just throw that in because that may be part of the mix and I do think the longer you're involved with something the more you realize we need to build this big infrastructure, this thing where all these people work together to come and go, oh wait, that's government. We don't like that. The people who get to the point where they say when we really wanna do a thing, it is government, so the messaging around government, as you know, there's some interesting work on that these days, but to fight off the government, the 30 years of government is the problem, we need to say, here's what government does for you, it does these things you wanna do. Well, you great society guys are gonna get us there whether we want to or not, right? Kicking and screaming. The 60s spirit died. The 60s spirit died when all of the people who said don't trust anybody over 30 became 30. That's what happened to us. I think an issue you bring up those two, that is very important, and it's one of the many, many cautions I've raised today, is to try not to get too moved by, what are unique characteristics of millennials versus what are characteristics of young people? Young people, right. Because some of this is young, right? And some of this, for instance, there's great criticism that causes have gone up on Facebook, over 30,000 causes on there in less than a year, but very little money raised. Well, look at the constituency on Facebook, college kids aren't gonna give a lot of money to causes. I think that that's a false measure to use and unfair criticism of their passions and attention to some of these issues as well. So it's not always clear which is which and which is gonna be a salient issue moving forward, but I think we do need to be cognizant of remembering that these are young people who are creating their own identities right now. Since you're identifying yourself as a data geek, I'm curious to what extent some of these millennial characteristics are partly because of the population boom. You know, because I grew up with no friends, because there was nobody living on my block. Like there was literally nobody in my school, my age, it was like I just walled graduating class. Gene, that's what they told you. Yeah. There wasn't enough of us to actually get together to do anything because we were crushed by the population ahead of us and the population behind us. I wanna tell you something, I'm so glad you raised that. I wanna tell you something that Peter Levine at University of Maryland told me, which I thought was so interesting. And he said, this looking at the surge of youth voting is extremely misleading because what you're looking at is a surge of youth. Right, there is just a larger number of 18 year olds than there ever has been. And in those states in particular where voting and civic engagement has always been high in say a Minnesota. Those young people are participating at the same level that their parents and grandparents did. So it does require, I think, a greater sensitivity to the fact that we are just looking in some ways at just any enormous generation of people. But also we have to know as they're moving along like the boomers, there's gonna be a great wake behind them as they're a changing society. Yeah. I thought these points, Spencer, are these generation really any different? Or is there a greater or lesser percentage of people involved? And I do think you sort of brought up that phrase, don't trust anyone over 30. I mean, I guess I think at least that mantra existed in the 60s. And I feel like now the mantra is almost the reverse. Like it's almost, let's trust the older generation to do right. I mean, I really do, like I think. Are you looking for a promotion or something? I mean, I think I did a little bit of research of when the Fair Wage campaign, when the hunger strike happened at Harvard last year. I did a little bit of research on how the rest of the campus reacted to the hunger strikers. And the majority of the campus seemed to be saying, seemed to be saying like, who are we, let's trust the administrators to make the right decision on this. That's just so rude. Maybe that is. But would they say that because they really believed it, or was it saying that because they didn't want to deal with it, and that was a great cover up? I mean, I guess potentially apathy would be no. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure about the cause underlying that, but I do think that there's this amazing trust for the older generation that. That's interesting. Yeah, that's I think in part, it's not just Harvard, but it probably does, it's probably a phenomenon that's enhanced by the selection mechanism that it takes to get into a selective college, would be my guess. That people sort of follow the rules in general. I think if you went into some inner city neighborhood and talked to people in the same age group where most of whom are gonna be lucky to go to community college, you might not feel exactly the same. You think that got the same reaction. But it also is reflective of this is not a rebellious generation. They are friendly with their parents because they wanna make sure they have some place to move back home to, I think. That's what I was gonna raise up, which is also one of the things not really put on the table yet is the role of economics and the economic basis of these kids' lives, which is essentially parent-fed still to a degree that is, you know, new. But new, I mean, each generation that comes along gets a little more parent-feeding, but this one is, you know, there's enough prosperity at the parental level to really allow a long, long, long delay before you enter into, you know, economic self-sufficiency. Well, and a dimming job outlook for young people and an increasing debt load for them as well, this is not a carefree generation. No, but it's one who, as you rightly say, you know, we need someplace mom and dad are still writing checks. Yeah. Who are we to distrust who's writing our check? The most obvious point about volunteerism is that you actually have to have money in order to do it. It's easier. You don't have to. You don't have to, but, you know. Particularly this style, particularly if you're getting on an airplane and flying to Guatemala, someone had to pay for this. Some of this style, some you don't, you know. Some you can do on a Sunday afternoon or do online. Right? Yeah. I wonder then, we talk about how things can descale out to big government, but what about local government? Yeah. You often see in your own community that the trends I see and the causes that I'm aware of is that they're a lot more international. So people are taking their effort that they maybe would agree with policy change and said, okay, I'm gonna go to Guatemala or I wanna know what's going on in Iran or China. And then they're also more local. So like people feel they can actually change, they have this change in government, they can change their local politicians. And I feel like there's more engagement on that level. I didn't see that in the research that I did. In fact, I saw a great disdain for local government and what you see is such a huge increase in either vacancies in local government positions or no competition for running, which really is a sign of neglect, I think, more than anything else. I hope you're right, but I haven't seen it yet. Yeah. As far as you raised before, you said you just, and I thought that coming you made about the idea that this was building capacity for some unforetold future mobilization was an interesting one. I guess I wonder what it will, I mean, maybe the Obama campaign is the tip of that iceberg in the sense that a mobilization behind a form of idealistic change is finally been packaged in a sufficiently attractive way that people under 30 are willing to buy in and contribute a little more time, effort, investment. But on the other hand, I do wonder, I mean, the indicators that the United States is entering sort of some kind of political financial crisis have been building for quite some time. 1% of the population is in prison. We're getting close to 10% on food stamps. I mean, this is a very dysfunctional system that has been going on for a while. Also, I guess I wonder what kind of crisis, would the crisis have to be packaged equally well, or what will it take before, you know, people get beyond the donating $20 to the Obama campaign to building the kind of sort of alternative state maybe that all of us are envisioning made up of move on.org and building organizations. Well, I'd hate to have to prophesize about Armageddon, but I think certainly if when we're looking at very high levels of unemployment has historically been a reason for mass organizing and protest, certainly. Yeah, military draft would do it. That's what did it for us. Or another attack, you know, might be as well. I think what's gonna be very interesting to see though is beyond the 08 election, so beyond what has become the opera of the Bush administration. Regardless of what side you're on, what has happened is the passions have been inflamed foreign against in such a loud, raucous way that once that catalyst is gone, I think it's gonna be very interesting to see how much people are participating in paying attention afterwards. I hope that there is an opportunity to engage and get to some systemic conversations about change, but I do wanna say if we took, if we went up 10,000 feet and looked at this historically, I think once you get from 9-11 through the debacle of this war and take that out of the equation, I wonder what's there for people to be passionate about at that public level, and that does speak to your question directly, right? No, I should have a question. So basically I didn't answer it, but I spent a long time on it. Yeah, I wonder what else. Well, I have really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate your input and your help. I'm gonna stay this afternoon to continue to talk about some of these issues as well. The paper for the Case Foundation will be coming out in the next month or so, and I'll be sharing the link, so you all can see that as well. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Tell me your name again? Sorry.