entrepreneurship

You chose to DREAM. And you chose to DO.

Now is your chance to INSPIRE the world with your story.

Ashoka’s Youth Venture and Changemakers is partnering with Staples to launch our first global competition to recognize young leaders who are finding new ways to create positive change in their communities.

In other words, we want to honor young leaders like you!!

Enter your project in the Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition to showcase your innovation, find supporters, and win prizes.

Tell us your story today at http://changemakers.net/node/9138/

Now through October 15th.

Winners will be announced November 12th.

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.

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?