generational alliance

The Generational Alliance has a job opportunity in youth organizing. Details after the jump.

I'm slowly coming back into the real world. I should be back to my normal schedule in the next day or two. Thanks so much to everyone who guest blogged for me. I've been reading the posts and they were fantastic. Here's my latest piece for MyDD. Also, a big welcome to Annie, our new intern.

Last weekend, I wrote about how the progressive youth movement – its organizations and its individual members – were disconnected from the progressive blogosphere. I got some pushback in the comments and elsewhere about that, with criticism generally raising two questions:

• Why do youth groups need to engage the blogosphere?
• How could existing youth org blogs change to make most effective use of the medium?

There’s no one answer to the first question. Not all youth orgs need to engage the blogs, and for different youth orgs, it would make sense to engage different types of blogs for different reasons. As Matt noted in the comments to my post last year, the blogosphere isn’t any one thing, and lumping all blogs in together and saying that “youth orgs need to know what’s going on” isn’t all that helpful. Reading the Daily Kos every day isn’t going to make our youth organizations or their members any more effective than they already are. There are many types of blogs written for a variety of purposes by a diverse range of people. Some of these will be helpful for youth orgs, some won’t.

The Young Democrats, for example, have chapters all over the country. Typically their work (canvassing and GOTVing young voters) is supportive of local candidacies, and often they work on local issues that can be aided by help from the broader progressive community in that area. It would make sense for local chapters to have their own blog (and in fairness, many of them do) that covered YDA Chapter X’s involvement in their local politics. It would make sense for that blog to be in dialogue with local blogs about local issues. There are partnerships to be formed there, local media narratives to change/establish, volunteers to be recruited, etc. And it’s a relationship that could go both ways, benefiting the local blogs, local progressives, and young progressives equally. Such a relationship would also help de-“ghettoize” youth politics, which is frequently siloed away from the activities of the "adults."

Another organization, The Roosevelt Institution, for instance, probably won’t care so much about what YDA is doing or about local candidates. But they’re probably very interested in what policy bloggers are talking about. Reading Ezra Klein, Max Sawicky, Brad DeLong, etc. would be instructional for a lot of RI’s aspiring policy wonks. In this case, the benefits are educational - reading the blogs and creating a forum for discussion on the organization’s own blog serves to educate all members about the intricacies of various policy issues. It will also probably increase their familiarity with the D.C. policy world.

I’m not going to run through each type of organization and what might work best, but there are clearly benefits to be gained for youth organizations to selectively engage the blogosphere based on their goals. The second question – how can existing blogs change to better serve their members and utilize the medium – is the more interesting one to me.