Grants

After reading various posts about the American Recovery and Readjustment Act on the main FM blog, I decided I'd share my views on the act, considering I will be a college student in the fall.

In this week's Pelosi 411 e-mail for students and young americans, there was a lot of talk about the act and how it will benefit college students.

"It will help students by boosting funding for Pell Grants, creating a $2,500 tax credit for nearly 4 million students, and tripling the number of science fellowships. This bill is also the first time that a tax credit will help students defray the rising costs of textbooks."

There was also a really good link to a YouTube video of Ohio representative, Tim Ryan, explaining the benefits the act will have towards higher education.

There was an interesting piece written by Emily Rutherford on Campus Progress about a group of students at University of Florida organizing a hunger strike to express concern about the university's endowments.

I am very hopeful about the passing of this bill because honestly I think it will affect me and thousands of other college students in a positive way. As an out of state student at University of Missouri, I've received a few scholarships, but yet I still worry about paying for college. I practically live on FastWeb and I stayed home from school today to finish up scholarship applications and essays that are due tomorrow.

I'm going to go out on limb here and trust President Obama, because its been a long time since I've had full faith in our leaders. I figure I should at least give them a chance.

Under the George W. Bush Administration, findyouthinfo.gov acted as a sort of clearinghouse for information on community and state programs that work with youth. There is even an interagency working group on youth programs. It's not clear how this working group operates or if it even has members that are young folks.

One issue with this site is that it conflates youth and children. FM has argued that children already have a host of lobbying, advocacy, and practitioner organizations in existence. This site seems promising, however, and if the Obama Administration chooses not to appoint a youth liaison --or if it does-- then expanding and refining findyouthinfo.gov would be a great asset for information on grants, non-profits that work with youth and programs executed by federal agencies.

Bumped. A good opportunity to get some grant money for those working on election year projects. --Mike

I'm excited, and I hope you will be, about the first Democracy 2.0 Grant Summit, launched this week. The first summit is on the impact of money in politics, sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation - so it's free to attend - in partnership with Mobilize.org.

Of course, I work for Mobilize.org but I'm also a Millennial who's experienced the deliberative dialogue process that Mobilize has been working on for the last year - I joined Mobilize in July. This is a major part of why I decided to work for Mobilize.org. I wanted to help build the infrastructure for Millennials to implement the solutions they create to problems that we all face, using peer to peer communications and web 2.0 tools. The success of our democracy in addressing the big, and small, issues of today and the future depends on the creativity and action of our fellow citizens.