{"id":1541,"date":"2009-03-09T11:01:53","date_gmt":"2009-03-09T16:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1541"},"modified":"2009-03-09T11:01:53","modified_gmt":"2009-03-09T16:01:53","slug":"generation-next-social-change-in-tough-economic-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/03\/09\/generation-next-social-change-in-tough-economic-times\/","title":{"rendered":"GENERATION NEXT:  Social Change in Tough Economic Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"left\" src=\"http:\/\/tbn3.google.com\/images?q=tbn:Chl_anh7aMZkzM:http:\/\/www.uis.edu\/servicelearning\/students\/images\/socialchange.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><em>\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is an excerpt from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/03\/08\/weekinreview\/08zernike.html?_r=1&amp;ref=weekinreview\">a piece by Kate Zernike in Sunday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Week in Review<\/a> (always my favorite section!) about how these economic times will shape the generation just coming of age. In short, there were plenty of comparisons made to the tight-lipped, nose-to-the-grindstone depression-era babies\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe grandparents who reuse tea bags and never buy lottery tickets. The author and her experts wondered, will the kids of today become stingy, safe, and square tomorrow?<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m skeptical. As I research my new book, a collection of ten profiles of people under 35 doing interesting social change work, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m coming across a very different trend. Tough economic times seems to have made young people creative and very practical\u00e2\u20ac\u201da stunning and hopeful combination. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feeling the burn. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s harder than it has been in decades to start a non-profit and get funding, for example. But here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the thing: today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s youngest and most cutting edge thinkers aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really starting non-profits or trending towards traditional methods of making the world more just. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re creating hybrid media companies, public-private ventures, drinking clubs, and secret societies. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re rejecting charity models and trying to figure out how to get folks to align their own self-interests with altruistic causes. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re thinking locally and globally simultaneously.<\/p>\n<p>They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not taking huge financial risks\u00e2\u20ac\u201deither personally or with the funding they bring in, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not keeping their philosophies or experiments \u00e2\u20ac\u0153safe,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as the NYT predicts. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just motivating them to be incredibly creative, really resourceful, and organic in their interventions. What a silver lining, heh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1910,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21102],"tags":[131,71,100],"class_list":["post-1541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generation-next","tag-economy","tag-intergenerational","tag-youth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1910"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}