His Journalistic Skills Help to Insure That Young Adults’ Voices Are Heard

Richard D. Thau started his professional life not as a charity official but as a journalist, working his way up to senior editor of a national publication called Magazine Week in just six years after his graduation from Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

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But when that magazine folded in 1993, Mr. Thau turned to the non-profit world, enticed by the chance to become his own boss and to “try to have an impact on society.”

“I thought to myself, I’m 28 years old, I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have a car,” says Mr. Thau (pronounced “tao”). “I can afford to take some pretty big risks right now.”

The risk he chose was to help start and run Third Millennium, a non-profit organization that works to get the views of people in their 20s and early 30s included in national policy debates. Mr. Thau says his vision was to eventually create a young person’s equivalent of the American Association of Retired Persons.

While the organization’s mission covers a wide range of topics, including crime, education, the environment, and race relations, the policy group decided early on to focus on ways to strengthen Social Security. “Having virtually no money, it was hard to be active on more than one issue at a time,” says Mr. Thau. “And there were relatively few young adults speaking out on entitlement issues, so we filled a niche.”

For the first seven months, Mr. Thau received no salary as the group’s executive director, and he ran the organization from the New York apartment he shared with several roommates. “One meeting we wedged 17 people into my bedroom,” he recalls.

Today, Third Millennium is on surer financial footing. It operates out of an office suite on New York’s Avenue of the Americas with seven full-time employees and a $665,000 budget.

It has also racked up an impressive list of accomplishments. Mr. Thau and the group’s board members have testified before Congress 17 times; published numerous opinion pieces in major newspapers; and spoken at national conferences, including last year’s White House conference on Social Security.

Third Millennium’s best-known survey, an opinion poll of young adults it commissioned in 1994, has had lasting resonance. Even four years later, President Clinton was still including references in his speeches to the poll’s finding that far more members of “Generation X” believe that they will see flying saucers than believe that they will receive retirement income from Social Security.

Such catchy statistics and phrases have become a hallmark of Third Millennium and stem in large part from Mr. Thau and several board members’ backgrounds in the news media. The organization’s current effort to collect e-mail messages for Congress on the topic of overhauling Social Security has been dubbed the “Billion Byte March.” A program to get the elderly to encourage their grandchildren to vote is titled Adopt a Voter.

But Mr. Thau’s journalism experience has proven to be a mixed blessing when it comes to raising money. He says that while his skill at asking questions and getting information out of people has come in handy, he has found it hard to shift gears from “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” as the journalism saying goes, to “trying to fund raise from the comfortable.”

“I’ve had some very candid discussions with funders which probably have not endeared me to them,” he explains. “A couple come to mind which were very unpleasant.”

Even the policy group’s fund-raising successes have not been without controversy. Most of the organization’s budget comes from private foundations and companies. Recent donors have included the Pew Charitable Trusts and J M Foundation, as well as the CSX Corporation, the Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation, and Rockwell International Corporation.

Mr. Thau says accepting such gifts sometimes opens the group up to criticism that it is unduly influenced by a particular viewpoint or political agenda.

In response to such charges, Mr. Thau insists that Third Millennium is — and always has been — non-partisan and has never strayed from the 32-page position statement it created at its start. With regard to Social Security, the organization advocates three changes: adding an “affluence test” that would allow poor people to receive more money in benefits than individuals with other sources of income, gradually increasing the eligibility age to 70, and allowing workers to redirect a portion of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts.

Mr. Thau says he does seek out partnerships with companies and foundations that he thinks might have interests that fit with his charity’s mission. He says he and his young colleagues in the non-profit world, if they want to succeed, have to be “very practical about what it takes to raise money and execute programs in the current competitive environment.”

The current process of raising money is one Mr. Thau would someday like to change. “The non-profit sector is desperately in need of rejuvenation,” he says. “We need to make it easier for people to start new organizations.” He says foundations and individual donors should set aside a much greater pool of money than currently exists to help new efforts with no proven track record get off the ground and grow.

“The existing barriers to entry are too formidable and stymie whatever non-profit entrepreneurialism already exists among people in their 20s and 30s,” he says. “These are the people who will advance the great causes of the 21st century.”