A New Guard Emerges

Savvy, pragmatic young leaders are reshaping the non-profit world

A new guard of non-profit leaders is emerging that will shape the charity world in the next century.

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How the Next Generation Is Shaping the Non-Profit World: Profiles on 10 Young Leaders

This latest crop of leaders looks distinctly different from those of previous decades. Many have come to the non-profit world after holding government or corporate jobs. A high number have graduated from Ivy League colleges.

In general, these new leaders gravitate toward solving local problems rather than striving to change national policies. Yet they want to do more than simply provide meals or shelter to people in need. They seek new ways to blend non-profit, government, and corporate work that will generate quick, quantifiable improvements to problems.

Even the language that these young leaders use is different from that of preceding generations. Terms like activist, social worker, and community organizer have been replaced by “social entrepreneur.” Impassioned speeches and rallying cries have given way to sober talk of “earned-income strategies” and evaluations and outcomes.

“It’s a very different era,” says Jonah Martin Edelman, the 28-year-old son of the civil-rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, who founded the Children’s Defense Fund. “There’s a real strong ethic of service and volunteerism, but not as strong a sense that you can work to change society.”

In keeping with that view, Mr. Edelman has decided to concentrate his work on local efforts. He recently moved from the nation’s capital to Oregon to run a local chapter of the national charity he started, Stand For Children, which advocates changes to help kids.

Like Mr. Edelman, many young leaders are setting up local projects, such as a new school or a computer-training workshop.

Several of the charities being started by new leaders today are aimed at helping teen-agers and young adults become activists or leaders themselves. For example, Do Something, which was started in 1993 by Michael Sanchez and the actor Andrew Shue (both now 31), recognizes top young leaders through its annual Brick Awards. The top winner each year receives $100,000 to support his or her work, and nine others receive $10,000 apiece.

Mr. Sanchez says he and his colleagues saw a gap that needed to be filled. “There were lots of programs that were helping young people, but they weren’t really tapping their energy,” he says. The new thinking, he says, “is to provide young people with the tools they need to solve their own problems in a proactive way.”

Young leaders have come up with a variety of approaches to try to achieve that end. Leslie Samuelrich, 35, started Green Corps, a non-profit organization in Boston, to recruit and train young people to become grassroots environmental organizers. Bart Decrem, 31, started Plugged In, a San Francisco charity, in part to arm children and teen-agers with computers skills they need to get ahead. Richard D. Thau, 33, trains high-school students to be policy leaders and helps them get their opinions printed in newspapers through the charity he helped start, Third Millennium. Meredith Blake started a charity called Break the Cycle to teach people ages 12 to 22 how to recognize and then avoid domestic violence.

But Pablo Eisenberg, a long-time activist who recently retired as head of the Center for Community Change, in Washington, says he worries that this generation of young adults may squander their opportunity to make a difference. “What I find disturbing is that there’s no sense of desire for civic engagement, for affecting the political life, for collective action,” says Mr. Eisenberg. “There’s no way they’re going to implement their ideals by just doing a little volunteer work on a one-to-one basis.”

Mr. Eisenberg says he has some real concerns about the future: “The question is, Who’s going to be the next generation to take over? And are they going to have courage and guts and speak out, or are they going to be namby-pambies? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Mrs. Edelman, of the Children’s Defense Fund, says that young people today need mentors like the ones she had in the 1960s. As a young lawyer, she worked alongside civil-rights leaders Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I always felt so lucky to be in an era where there were so many giants among us,” she says. “Because things are more complex now and cynicism is so ripe, really investing in youth leadership and in intergenerational opportunity is crucial. We owe this generation the same level of support.”

Some grant makers are starting to share that view. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, started a Next Generation Leadership program in 1997 to give two-year fellowships to “a new corps of leaders who have the skills to rebuild a society based on democratic principles.”

Other grant makers are considering starting similar projects. For example, officials of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Righteous Persons Foundation (started by the film maker Steven Spielberg), and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund met in December to discuss ways they could help support young leaders in Jewish philanthropy.

“We’re starting to see a trend of foundations and other organizations looking into what the next generation is into,” says Elizabeth Greenstein, a 33-year-old program assistant at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, in New York. “People want to really know how to get us engaged. They want to make sure we don’t sit back and let the grown-ups take care of our future.”

One model many young leaders say they hope to see repeated is the fellowship program offered by the Echoing Green Foundation, in New York. The organization over the past eight years has given start-up money and other help to about 250 non-profit entrepreneurs.

Echoing Green “believed in us when we were literally just a scribble on a piece of paper,” says Van Jones, 30, who founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, in San Francisco. “They took a big risk on us.”

In addition to giving money, groups such as Echoing Green and Do Something bring young leaders together to share their ideas. Other support groups are also sprouting up, including the Young Nonprofit Professionals’ Network, in San Francisco, and North Carolina Youth for Tomorrow.

Many non-profit leaders, young and old, believe that those people entering the philanthropic world today are fueled as much by self-interest as by altruism.

Says Peter Frumkin, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: “The newer generation is focused not just on what the sector can do for clients, but at the same time on what the sector can do for ‘me.’ It’s as much an opportunity as a social calling. These younger people demand a lot of self-actualization and satisfaction — this is not a self-flagellating group.”

Many young leaders say different times dictate different responses. Mr. Thau, of Third Millennium, says issues like the ones his organization weighs in on — such as how to finance Social Security in the future — are far more technical and cerebral than were the issues of greatest concern in the past.

“In the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he says, “people looked at civil rights and they said, ‘This is a great moral crusade. It’s wrong that black folks have to sit at the back of a bus or they can’t sit at a lunch counter.’ And people would get emotionally involved and want to fight against it.” He says the same was true with protests against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

“You had a lot of people who were just willing to put themselves out there because the times sort of called for it,” says Mr. Thau. “But you’re not going to see people coming out to the streets saying, ‘Let’s raise the retirement age for Medicare!’” he says. “That’s not a rallying cry.”

While the causes have changed, many observers believe that young people’s interest level and enthusiasm have not.

Brian O’Connell, a professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University who has spent nearly 50 years in the non-profit world, says people tend to romanticize the civil-rights era. “We tend to look back on it as if the whole country was aroused, when it was really a relatively small group of enormously dedicated, enormously passionate people,” he says.

Mr. O’Connell, who headed the national coalition of grant makers and charities known as Independent Sector for 14 years, says he believes that the same passion exists today.

“A far higher proportion of young adults are involved today, in part because of the civil-rights movement,” he says. “It just isn’t as visible because there isn’t any one cause that is ringing out to so many people.”

While the number of causes have multiplied, so too have the number of charities, all competing for the same pool of public attention and donations.

Such competitive pressures have caused many young charity leaders to consider a wide range of options for financing their organizations. Many supplement charitable contributions with money from corporate marketing departments, fees charged to people who receive services, or income from for-profit subsidiaries. Vanessa Kirsch, founder of the national youth group Public Allies, at age 32 is leading an effort called New Profit Inc. to try to apply venture-capital models from business to the charity world (The Chronicle, April 9, 1998).

It is precisely this generation’s desire to mix and match practices from business, government, and non-profit groups that most often pits young adults against older non-profit leaders, who tend more to worry about charities’ becoming too corporate, thereby risking the tax exemptions and other benefits they now receive.

“This generation needs to be careful not to become too commercial,” says Mr. O’Connell, of Tufts University. “The problem with so many organizations today is that they want to find the easy way to raise money that doesn’t get in the way of devoting most of their time and attention to programs. And that just has never been possible.”

Most young leaders say they are mindful of concerns about stepping too far into for-profit territory. But many believe that they must experiment in order for their organizations to survive.

Indeed, insuring that their non-profit groups will be around for decades to come is a driving goal of this generation. Andrew Carroll, who at age 29 runs the American Poetry & Literacy Project, in Washington, says that those in his age group are trying to hold on to the idealism that characterized civil-rights leaders while not losing the practical side of managing day-to-day operations.

Adds Ms. Blake, the 28-year-old lawyer who runs an anti-domestic-violence charity in Los Angeles: “We recognize that all is for naught if you don’t institutionalize policies and procedures that will create a sustainable movement.”

Ms. Blake is one of 10 young men and women The Chronicle profiles to paint a picture of what motivates the new generation of non-profit leaders, and to show how they will help reshape the non-profit world in the next millennium.