Young People First: Preparing for America's Future
by Kristin Ivie on 5 Oct 2009
Guest blogger Zach Kolodin is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Young People First, establish a powerful constituency of young people to advocate for long-term priorities in America.
Although social media buzz revolves around the 24-hour news cycle, some Millennials are trying to move the horizon of the political debate a bit further into the future. Young People First (YPF) is single-mindedly committed to giving Millennials the tools to discuss, strategize, and hold political leaders responsible to a vision of a prosperous, sustainable future.
YPF is building a Future Preparedness Index, with the help of young people (ages 17-35), to represent the Millennial Generation’s shared long-term interests. Future preparedness represents a vision of what a responsible government ought to provide: sustainable prosperity and security that benefits all Americans over the long term. So we are working with social citizens and youth-led organizations to produce specific future preparedness goals to which young people can hold their leaders accountable.
The YPF team began thinking about strategies to improve the quality of youth participation in politics in the months before Barack Obama’s election in 2008. We noticed that while young people were making monumental efforts on behalf of both presidential candidates, most of the media content devoted to young people failed to describe their substantive and distinctive political interests, and instead focused on their collective “Obama crush”.
The idea of Millennials latching on to Barack Obama purely because of a crush is consistent with the dominant narrative of young people as a fickle constituency without clear political interests. However, that narrative is simply false. Young people have not only the energy to enact policy change, but also the wherewithal and capability to hold political leaders accountable to our vision of a prosperous future.
To that end, YPF is beginning to train young people to analyze legislation for how well it improves America’s future preparedness. The key here is not just helping more people develop their own assessments of legislation, but also helping them spread that analysis to their peers. Ultimately, our Legislation Analysis Corps members need to become social citizens in order to be successful.
When the Future Preparedness Index is launched, we'll consistently connect current legislation to long-term, real world outcomes. All significant legislation will be accompanied by a citizen-generated 'future preparedness assessment’. With any success, we’ll see young people taking responsibility for preserving and maintaining what makes America great.
We cannot create a system of accountability like this alone. We need your ideas and energy. Help us take the first step by filling out this questionnaire.
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We showed the power of social media yesterday with Women's Fund Blogging Against Violence, with a room full of local bloggers interviewing police officers, judges, social workers, all kinds of people involved in domestic violence work. The cause was our Voices Against Violence initiative, to raise money and awareness about grants to reduce incidents of domestic violence assault. We picked up plenty of interest throughout the day, with streaming video of the in-house event and Twitter comments from far and wide. We'll see what the long-term impact will be but the power of that community, linked through social media, was amazing. Go to www.thewomensfundbham.org or temporarily to the nbc13.com site (key word women's fund) or follow the thread with #wfundbham on Twitter to see what was going on.
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