March 6, 2008 | Read Time: 7 minutes
If you tell the typical college or graduate student that nonprofit groups are struggling to recruit qualified young candidates for entry-level jobs and facing a tough time filling leadership vacancies, they won’t believe you.
As graduate students pursuing degrees in nonprofit leadership, we see plenty of interest in nonprofit work — but too few opportunities for the kind of meaningful work our generation is seeking.
One sign of the passion young people display for nonprofit groups can be seen in volunteer trends. More than any other age group, members of Generation Y — people born from 1977 to the mid-1990s — are volunteering their time in growing numbers.
But volunteering is not the only way that members of Generation Y express their desire to be involved in civic affairs. This year’s heated presidential primaries have demonstrated, contrary to previous findings, that young people in America are ready and willing to make their voices heard through the political process.
According to CNN exit polls and tabulations from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, young voters turned out in record numbers in almost every state that held a primary or caucus on Super Tuesday. Striking turnouts in the votes held before that day included New Hampshire, where the number of young people voting grew to 43 percent compared with 18 percent in 2004’s primary, and Michigan, where people ages 18 to 29 made up 17 percent of Democratic-primary participants and 13 percent of Republican-primary participants.
What’s more, organizations like Teach for America are getting so much interest from top-notch college students that they are forced to turn away many job seekers. In 2007 the organization accepted only 16 percent of its roughly 18,000 applicants , about the same acceptance rate as an Ivy League college.
And perhaps the most important indication of commitment: Nearly 250 colleges are offering courses in nonprofit management, and at least 90 offer graduate-level courses. Many of these courses are filled with young people who leave the campus with the skills they need to take the types of entry- and midlevel managerial positions that are essential to grooming people for senior leadership jobs.
To be sure, nonprofit groups face serious competition in seeking talent, and that is why so many nonprofit leaders are worried about an impending labor shortage as the baby boomers start to retire. Business and government often have the edge over nonprofit groups because they are able to offer higher salaries, increased mobility, more “flex time,” and even student-loan forgiveness — benefits that are difficult and sometimes impossible for many debt-ridden graduates to turn down.
But for the most part, the crisis in the nonprofit work force has nothing to do with the number of available and interested young people in the labor market and the competition from other employers. Instead, it is a “value gap” that is preventing young people from dedicating themselves to a nonprofit career path.
College and graduate students interested in nonprofit work are stuck in a vise between the pressures and values of the two generations above them, Generation X, born from 1965 to 1976, and the baby-boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964.
Many baby boomers came of age during the political upheaval of the 1960s and the prolonged pains of the draft and Vietnam War. As a result, many of them came to believe that political activism, whether peaceful or sometimes violent, was necessary to change what were perceived to be unjust government policies. Nonprofit groups played a necessary and adversarial role that spurred the government into action. That view shapes the leadership approach of many nonprofit leaders today.
Generation X, however, matured during the ascendancy of the conservative movement. Its members saw the federal government increasingly shift responsibility for social needs to business or nonprofit groups.
The loss of government funds at many nonprofit groups led to a new outlook, one that focused on borrowing the approaches of business and developing new forms of social entrepreneurship — a reliance on individuals to devise new ways to solve problems. Many of the ideas championed by Generation X are at direct odds with the values and traditions of the eldest generation of nonprofit leaders.
And Generation Y’s views don’t match those of either the boomers or people now in their mid-30s and 40s.
As teenagers and adults, we have grown up with nearly five years of war in Iraq. That experience has given us little evidence that government is malleable or trustworthy, or that it responds to calls of dissent. Nor are young people entirely trusting of business to provide leadership or consistent resources for social change. First we experienced the sudden bursting of the dot-com bubble and now we see the subprime-mortgage crisis, which has destroyed the financial foundation for much of the nation’s underclass.
Perhaps our most important formative moments occurred during the heart-wrenching tragedies of the 2001 terrorism attacks, when we were told that young people could do nothing for the greater good other than express loyalty to America through expanded consumerism. Four years later, we witnessed the pathetic failures of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
It should not come as a shock, then, that this generation has turned away from government and business to the nonprofit world as a preferred medium to effect change, whether as volunteers or professionals.
We are the first generation that has benefited from the opportunities made available through the AmeriCorps national-service program, passed in 1993, and, as a result, many of us have participated in nonprofit efforts to clean up the messes created by government or business.
We have concluded that the role of nonprofit groups is one primarily of delivering services and pushing for gradual policy changes that will improve the lives of Americans in need. Social movements today are not borne passionately on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but are the result of incremental and persistent efforts pursued by successful nonprofit groups.
Teach for America provides an excellent example of a nonprofit group that has captured the imagination and skills of Generation Y by asking young people to provide a service to others, and then to get involved in the long-term efforts that will gradually improve school districts around the country.
The results are building every year — Teach for America alumni have created and expanded charter schools, work at almost every level of government, and, years after their tenure as teachers have ended, still actively seek to promote the organization’s mission by pursuing advocacy efforts.
The growth of the organization — and others like it — is a sign that the worker shortage so many nonprofit leaders bemoan is not the result of an imperfect labor market, but a failure by many charitable organizations to capitalize on the skills and values of a generation that is full of people ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. The myopic vision of nonprofit leaders today may be the real problem, not the demographics that will change the nation’s work force significantly over the next few decades.
Each generation has come of political age under different sets of formative experiences that have naturally shaped the way that they view the interaction, purpose, and intersection of government, business, and nonprofit organizations.
Young people considering nonprofit careers today are caught in a confusing bind of values that puts the power of social movements, coalition building, and advocacy on one end and the necessity of business approaches, social entrepreneurship, and the power of individual leaders on the other.
If colleges and graduate programs are successful, they should produce students who have a deep understanding of the traditions of the nonprofit world as well as of current trends and the influence of business and innovation in philanthropy.
And after learning these different threads of nonprofit work supplied by the generations before them, students ought to be equally skeptical of both. It should be, as it was for both Generation X and the baby boomers, the job of members of the younger generation to question the methods and values of their elders. Successful nonprofit groups, those that are succeeding in recruiting and retaining young, talented graduates and building them into leaders, already know this. Perhaps it’s time for the rest of the nonprofit world to catch up.
Sonya Behnke and Pilar Oberwetter are pursuing master’s degrees at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute, where they are both Waldemar A. Nielsen philanthropy fellows. Ms. Behnke is also an editorial intern at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
