building the bench

Update: Also remember to check out the jobs and training section of our wiki for more opportunities to find training or employment in progressive politics.
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As I talk to more and more of the folks who are working to build leadership capacity in the progressive youth movement. I'm finding that it's not for lack of programs that we're suffering. Young People For Fellowships, PolitiCorps, Camp Wellstone, DMI Scholars, DFA Academies, New Organizing Institute - we're building the structures. They may not be as sexy as some of the conservative operations, but programs are available for all sectors of the movement. It's scale and funding that are the real problems.

With that in mind, here's a no-cost, potentially high impact opportunity to get some training for all you out there in "youth" land. And you won't even have to travel.

DMI Scholars has officially launched. This is a fantastic and much needed program designed to train the next generation of progressive leaders:

The DMI Scholars program addresses one of the most critical challenges facing the progressive movement today: the lack of a pipeline dedicated to supporting and guiding talented young people into the field of public policy. DMI Scholars will identify progressive college students from diverse communities and train them in the skills necessary to obtain and succeed in entry-level public policy positions. Our mission is to increase and diversify the pool of strong candidates that enters key professions in the field, better equipping the movement to affect reforms on a policy level. With DMI's network and expertise, DMI Scholars will become the future Legislative Directors, Issues Directors, Policy Analysts and Strategists that fuel the progressive movement with new ideas and effective advocacy.

Tsedey Betru of the Drum Major Institute has a blog about the launch posted on Kos. If you've got an account, go give it a recommend.

Apropos of my last post, I just wanted to add that last week the 2020 Democrats closed shop due to lack of funding.

It's sad to see them go. They were one of a number of groups that sprang out of the 2003/2004 Presidential cycle (including MFA and Drinking Liberally). They tried some interesting ideas, such as using wiki's to create collaborative statements of progressive values, and they held one of the better "Young Democrats" events that I attended at the 2004 convention in Boston. Ultimately, it seemed like they wanted to be a Roosevelt Institution for progressive grad students and young professional set.

It's a shame to see them go, and I hope Josh and Jorge end up landing on their feet at another progressive organization. I've pasted their "farewell email" after the jump. I encourage everyone to read it.

In their July/August issue, Utne explores the differences between how Conservatives and Progressives build their bench. It's an OK primer on how the Republicans fund/foster leadership programs for their young prospects, and how Progressives are playing catch-up (the real article to read here is My Right Wing Degree), but I'm not wild about some of the examples they used to depict young progressives. Particularly their focus on GreenCorps. Whether that says more about the depth of reporting or the state of young progressive leadership programs and those who attend them is debatable. And it probably should be debated.

But in writing this, I wanted to highlight one particularly troubling fact (emphasis mine):

"We do have more people [than the right] to draw from as raw material on college campuses," says David Halperin. But the Leadership Institute has a $9.4 million budget, and its Campus Leadership Program is expanding rapidly. Between September 2004 and May 2006 the number of conservative student groups it helped start grew from 216 to 731. This fall Blackwell will dispatch 60 field staff members across the country and expects to push that total to 1,000 groups by the end of the year. By contrast, Green Corps and Campus Progress each have fewer than 20 staffers and budgets of about $1.5 million.

To put it bluntly, this is bullshit. In 2004, over $200 million was poured into building progressive infrastructure for the election. Many of those groups, like America Coming Together, were mothballed after the election. Some are reemerging now that the election cycle is heating up, others disapeared for good. The amount of that money directed to "young voter programs" during that same period was probably somewhere around the vicinity of $6-8 million.

Despite the fact that many of these groups (Music for America, PunkVoter, Indyvoter, Young Voter Alliance, MoveOn Student Action) were started from scratch in late 2003 and early 2004, and most of the staff were political newbies, we were still able to increase turnout to record levels and young people were the only voting block in the country to swing for Kerry. That $6-8 million was clearly the best investment progressive funders made in the 2004 election cycle. So why are our "youth" groups struggling to find funding in these off years, and why aren't progressive funders working to correct the imbalance between the Right and the Left in building our respective benches? More after the jump.

Ed. Note: this was first published on MyDD in July of 2005. Some edits have been made in this version to reference new research or clean up some language.

If you want to get apolitical youth involved in politics, you have to make political participation a cultural phenomenon.

I won't be shy about saying that "youth organizing," "youth issues," or most things that might fall under those rubrics get short shrift throughout the blogosphere. Granted, Kos and Atrios and Chris Bowers have all made efforts to point out what's going on - Atrios posts liberally about Drinking Liberally, Bowers gives Young Philly Politics shout-outs, and Kos has made multiple mentions of Cosmopolity and Music for America on his site - but for the most part, these topics are rarely picked up by the community. This surprises me. According to the 2006 Blog Ads Survey, 15% - a not insubstantial number - of the progressive blogosphere is between 14 and 30. My peers are in the blogosphere, they just don't speak or post from a generational point of view.

That is unfortunate, because "activating" and organizing young voters is incredibly important for the Democratic Party. 2004 was a record year for youth turnout. (PDF) Turnout was up to 51% (from 34%) nationwide, and turnout in swing states reached as high as 64%. It turned out that The Kids Were Alright in 2004. Their participation was a big boon to John Kerry, and as Joe Trippi noted in the WSJ, it saved his ass from McGovern-esque ridicule. Kerry carried young voters by a 10-point margin - a dramatic improvement over Al Gore's split decision with Dubya in 2000 - and the "kids" were only age demographic to break in favor of the Democrats. (The new study to read in this respect is A Gift to Democrats by Skyline Public Works. Look for a detailed analysis of that study soon.)

But to say that Kerry carried young voters is misleading. Many of us cast our ballots not for Kerry, but against Bush.