Social Entrepreneurship and Youth

As I work on my book, I'm writing about the many new organizations run by and for Millennials that have sprung up over the course of the last four years. Usually that means that I'm writing about how and why those organizations got started.

For instance, Drinking Liberally got its start because Justin Krebs and Matt O'Neil wanted to integrate their social lives with political discussion. They knew lots of folks in creative fields and in politics, and thought that the two crowds could learn a lot from each other through informal discussion over some pints. No organization existed to make those social ties, so they created one themselves. Music for America began because myself, Dan Droller and Franz Hartl saw first hand how traditional political action - protest - failed to stop the march to war. We were all avid music fans and concert goers and we all thought that Rock the Vote was a failure in mobilizing those communities. So we set out to mobilize them ourselves on behalf of Howard Dean, the credible anti-war candidate.

Campus Progress, Young People For, Oregon Bus Project, National Hip Hop Political Convention, The League of Young Voters, The Roosevelt Institution, DMI Scholars, Forward Montana, New Era Colorado, Punk Voter . . . the list of new organizations that were either started by Millennials or created for and primarly run by Millennials could go on, and each would have a similar story.

In each instance, I've focused on the how and why each organization started - where the funding came from, what hole the org filled in the larger progressive movement, etc. But there's another why. One that goes deeper than the strategic failures of existing organizations or the gaps in progressive youth infrastructure. Why has all of this social entrepreneurialism emerged from the minds and actions of young people?

For the most part, I've taken the fact that so many new organizations sprang my generation as proof of what I'd heard in other places - that we are the most entrepreneurial and civic minded generation in decades. But a new essay by Clay Shirky got me thinking differently about this topic.

Shirky's essay, The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth, boils down to this: young people are inherently better entrepreneurs than older people. Not because we are young, but because we are inexperienced. It is precisely that lack of experience that opens us up to completely new ways of interpreting things and makes us better innovators. Unlike our more experienced elders, we don't have years of repetition and conventional wisdom bogging us down.

It's an interesting observation, and while overly broad, I think there's a lot of truth to it. Many of the organizations that Millennials started these last years are not revolutionary. At least not to us. In fact, they're obvious, and in some cased it's amazing that no one was already doing them. The fact that these organizations or the strategies they employ didn't already exist is a testament to many things that were (and continue to be) wrong in progressive politics: conventional wisdom about young voters (they don't turn out) and "what works" as a GOTV tactic (broadcast media); tired tactics and activities with limited appeal (old school youth orgs populated by resume padders); a laser focus on college students at top tier schools as representative of the entirety of the youth vote, and campuses as the place to organize young voters; taking young people for granted as cheap campaign labor rather than a valued constituency, etc.

Youth is a part of it, to be sure, but I think the lack of experience is the key. It's something of a joke among my friends that the Dean campaign and a lot of political start-ups circa 2004 were infested with ex-theater folks. I don't think that's an insignificant anecdote. Many of us who came onto the scene in the last four years are from outside the political system. That made us blind to what most people thought was or was not possible in progressive Democratic politics, but it was also our biggest strengths, and our value added to progressive politics. We were a breath of fresh air and new ideas. The same dynamic can be seen at work in the rise of the netroots, where people outside the system are breathing new life into a power structure that long ago ossified and became irrelevant.

That said, a tension also exists. Social Entrepreneurship, and the good luck to have the right idea at the right time are not enough. Experience, too, must get its due.

I think that one of the reasons that most college activism knee-jerks into some form of protest is because most college kids have no idea where the levers of power are in their community. They don't know how to navigate student government, or city council, or the Chancellor's office or Alumni Association to accomplish change on their campus. So they grasp at what the media has always told them social change looks like in our country - people marching, rallying, sitting in, protesting.

Most young activists could use a little more experience to help them navigate traditional power structures. But those who possess that experience need us outsiders just as much to keep their work cutting edge and relevant. We need a little more formal knowledge, and they need our social entrepreneurialism. It's a partnership, and how well we do over the next few years in creating a vibrant, coherent youth movement will in part be determined by how well we navigate that relationship.