Mission Statement

Boy has this blogging thing caught on. You can’t read a news article these days without a quote from someone’s blog, as so many experts jump on the bandwagon and take on this new pastime as the mistress to the careers they are married to during the day. And many of these verbose typing maniacs are members of the infamous “Generation Y,” the terror of the current business and nonprofit worlds- the subject of so much controversy, and so many blogs, that an entire slang language has been born just to discuss this shadowy mass of teens and twenty-somethings. Generation Y, alternately called Generation Me, the Millennial Generation, Generation Q, Generation IPOD, the Internet Generation…I know of no official name, no label that adequately describes the group, except one. My generation.
We are often defined as those born around the late 70’s through the early years of the next century, although again, the label is fuzzy. There are around 70 million of us in America alone. We are the most diverse generation of Americans yet, with one out of three of us being a person of color. We are most often distinguished from our predecessors of Generation X and the Baby Boomers by our comfort with, and often dependence on, the many technological advances that have become a reality during the early years of our tenure. Between laptops that continually get smaller and cheaper, Bluetooth, voice recognition, and cell phones that play music, check email, instant message, and tell us where our friends are at any given second, a public sentiment I have heard increasingly from parents, teachers, and others of the older generations is that this technologically saturated lifestyle has bred the “Millennials” into young adults who don’t know how to relate to people face to face, and who depend on technology to accomplish things they should be able to do themselves. Even Thomas Friedman, in his article to light a fire under the butts of the “Quiet Americans,” points out that “Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the worlds by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms.” But who knows what COULD have been accomplished by Dr. King and other revolutionaries if they had had tools like Facebook, if they could have reached millions of people each day with a few clicks of their mouse? The older generations’ obsession with our tech savvy simply highlights their own lack of comfort with all of the incredible developments their own hard work has created for us all. And while they flounder around, stuck in their mid-to-late twentieth century rut, why would they blame us Y’ers for taking the opportunity to stretch the muscles of all of these new advancements? As the only generation of adults to be born in the 20th century that will live the large majority of our lives in the 21st, we are in a unique position to bridge the gap between past, present and future. Who knows what could be done with all of the new technology and knowledge we have gained in the past few decades- who knows how far we can take it? In fact, who knows how far it’s already being taken, by Generation IPOD, every day?
A discussion on NPR’s Forum addressed the issue of Generation Y by presenting the results of an MTV survey about our views of happiness, and then listening to a college professor label our confidence as narcissism. Our fault, she said, is putting ourselves before duty, volunteering because we want to be volunteers instead of feeling compelled. Why is it wrong to put what we care about before what the rest of the world thinks we should care about? The concept of duty is meaningless if there is no personal context. Millennials are a generation of perpetually optimistic and oddly idealistic citizens. We believe we can do anything if we try hard enough, because we believe we are entitled to succeed. This is the fatal mistake that poor college professor has made. We are not narcissistic- we just believe we deserve the world, and we deserve it the best it can be. We feel entitled to have enough food, a good place to live, warm clothes, and an education. And we feel that everyone else is entitled to these things, as well. More directly relevant, we feel entitled to be happy with our jobs. Unlike any generation before us, we feel entitled to fulfillment, and it is that expectation that has Generation IPOD hip-hopping our way into leadership positions in the world of nonprofit and philanthropy far more quickly than those before us.
Just as technology is progressing at an ever-increasing pace, so is the potential of the Millennial Generation- to create things once believed to be pure science fiction, to break down walls once thought impenetrable, and to solve problems that even now seem hopeless. Not only do we have more and greater technologies and opportunities than any generation before us, but we are using them in completely new ways- which is what has those Boomers and X’ers backing away nervously and muttering about the loss of social consciousness. But if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, why would Generation Y follow in the shaky footsteps of all that the past generations have failed to work out? While older generations spend their time trying to kindle our sense of civic duty, Gen Y’ers are establishing organizations to solve world hunger, rebuilding New Orleans with our bare hands, we are already looking to the future and educating those younger and less fortunate than us. And we are fighting an endless war, graduating from college, leading protests, and making the world smaller every day.
I say this to my fellow members of Generation Y: don’t be fooled when you hear about our selfishness and our narcissism, because all around us are people our age making things happen in new ways, and in their own ways.
I say this to Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers, and others who stand in bewildered fear: Some calming breaths may help, and enable you to jump on the bandwagon so that before you are gone and we take over, our earth will be greener, our people healthier, and our countries more peaceful.
And to us all: There’s so much that’s already being done by this controversial generation of rising stars to fix both the problems that we ourselves are causing, and those that we’ve only inherited. Let’s take a look around.