I’ve been lucky enough to meet millennials who are working in nonprofits in the last month and I’d like to highlight them here.
- Jonathon Lunardi from Charity for Debt
- Cristina Moon from 8-8-08 For Burma
- Karina Qian from TechY (so new that they don’t have a web site)
Jonathon Lunardi’s startup nonprofit is based on getting students into paid volunteer positions at local charities and using those positions to help pay for the loans incurred while getting a college education. What’s really fascinating is that he’s adept with PHP and also coded the org’s website. This seems to be typical of millennials in that they reach for digital tools at the same time they’re starting up their organizations. Traditionally, to start a 501c3, you’d form a board, have a few constituents in your neighborhood form around you and and start fundraising. These days, a website and an organizational e-mail address is the real de facto beginning of a nonprofit.
Cristina Moon’s 8-8-08 For Burma is an organization formed on Burmese advocacy using the startup to the Olympics as part of the campaign. The Web site just came up a week or so ago. It’s actually Wordpress (designed by Matthew from theCoup) that powers the site which is perfect for very small nonprofits.
Karina Qian hasn’t even finished college yet and she’s already trying to match up nonprofits in Southeast Asia and the Middle East with technologists. She’s already been to Netsquared. Has your Executive Director been there yet? And her organization is mostly Facebook-based.
I find it fascinating that these millennials have such facility with social media. I’m a Gen X-er myself and I find myself surrounded by ignorant over 30 types whose primary modes of communication are still e-mail and not IM or Twitter. I’m still told that Facebook is for kids (sigh).
For these three, blogs and IM are as natural to them as writing a grant. There’s been much made about the loss of executive leadership that is going to come in the next decade. For one, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing and given the new crop of Executive Directors coming into the sector, we’ll at least not have to explain IT basics to these folks. Imagine yourself as an IT director years from now, and you won’t have to worry about explaining the loss of control due to a “comments” section on a blog, indeed you won’t have to explain what a blog is. Your primary worry years from now when these folks come into their own in the sector will probably in redefining what an IT director will be. If you don’t have enough hardcore skills now, it will be harder to differentiate your services versus what the average nonprofit manager will have in a few years. Learn to code, learn to innovate, learn to align IT resources with the mission — your nonprofit manager counterparts are catching up!
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