A Call to Young Workers to Elevate Nonprofit Voice in Policy Matters

Denver

Young nonprofit workers need to push the nonprofit world to educate lawmakers about the work of charities and become more involved in public policy, because older people are not going to take on the task, Robert Egger, founder of the V3 Campaign, told an audience at the annual Young Nonprofit Professionals Network conference here today.

Mr. Egger started the V3 Campaign to educate politicians about the economic contributions that nonprofit organziations make. A baby boomer, Mr. Egger said that many members of his generation are too complacent to take a lead in that effort.

“My generation, we’re comfortable, we’re just standing there while we should be moving,” he said. “My generation chose to drop out; yours can rage.”

Mr. Egger talked about his quest to figure out why the nonprofit world has so little voice in policy debates. Part of it, he said, is that many charities were started in the 1970s by women who were shut out of the business world. But they ran up against male-dominated foundations that chose to give out small grants and keep the charity leaders on “very short leashes,” he said.

Mr. Egger said that young workers will run up against opposition if they try to organize and get their groups more involved in policy. “They will call you self-promoters,” he said. “They will call you crazy.”

But he said people in their 20s and 30s, with their understanding of social entrepreneurship and for-profit models of change, have an incredible opportunity to bridge what he called “this dot-com, dot-org divide.”

Unlike members of Generation X, many of whom discovered things like microenterprise in business school and didn’t apply lessons of social enterprise to improving the field in a big way, younger workers can use this knowledge to help the field as a whole become stronger.

“They got lost on a very, very cool journey and your generation must now take up the gauntlet,” he said. “Your Haight-Ashbury is going to be social activism and social enterprise.”