I had a great time at last night’s GenNext launch at Museum London (#gennextuw). GenNext is a United Way initiative to get young people (20′s & 30′s) more engaged in philanthropy & volunteering. The speaker was Marc Kielburger, co-founder of Me to We, an impressively accomplished young guy who shared some of his experience working in a Thai AIDS ward, his unplanned Maasai wedding ceremony, and lessons he learned first-hand from the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa.
You can read Kate Dubinski’s article on the event — though I actually prefer her earlier blog post at LFPress:
Are we more philanthropic and giving of our time than our parents were? I don’t know — as you may know, I’m always a little hesitant to call one generation something more/less/better/worse than another. (The Greek philosophers talked about how bad the reading skills and organization skills of their younger peers were. If we really were declining with each generation, we’d be monkeys by now. No offence to monkeys).
(None taken.) The rest is here.
I was especially struck by Kielburger’s warning that most important issue of our time is “we are raising a generation of passive bystanders.”
But there are glimmers of hope.
On one hand we see that people increasingly want to do work that matters — as part of our respective careers, not just something on the side.
On the other hand, towards the same end, we see more and more global challenges framed as things we need to address — climate change, poverty, social injustice, inequality, disease — and it’s difficult to picture how for-profit enterprises could manage to address those very effectively… nor governments, for that matter.
So it’s tempting to spend a lot of time researching, thinking, and writing about the intellectual & institutional aspects (and I probably will) — dreaming big — but what we need now more than anything is momentum to accumulate through real action, then philanthropic behaviours will spread via networks of trust, and in the process we’ll gradually figure out what to do and how to do it well.
It simply comes down to one friend saying to another, “I’m going to do this. Will you join me?”
Then we can work on the institutional aspect as we go along. The important thing now is to go forward and not let plans get in the way.
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Note: I’m speaking as someone who’s normally very apathetic… I probably wouldn’t have gone to this event if it wasn’t for some last-minute beneficence from Lindsay Sage (thanks!), and I likely wouldn’t have expressed even delayed interest if I hadn’t previously met Jason Hastings from United Way and recognized his dedication to social change. And I wouldn’t have met him if it wasn’t for Jodi Simpson bringing people together… and so-on.
[Btw, none of the aforementioned would've happened without Twitter.]
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That’s what it comes down to, and where it all leads: genuine human connections. Which is ultimately what Marc Kielburger and his brother have done: made the most of their local opportunities; those eventually led out to relationships and opportunities around the world and they’re still growing.
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