Hello fellow Kossacks Under 35. It's been a while since I've been around these parts (though I've popped in as a lurker now and again), so let me reintroduce myself. I've been involved in progressive/Democratic youth politics for four years now. In 2003/4 I helped start a group called Music for America that reached young people through local music scenes. For the last year, I've run a blog about progressive youth activism called Future Majority (which I hope y'all will check out). I'm currently writing a book about progressive youth activism, and earlier this month I was fortunate to be the moderator and organizer for a panel at Yearly Kos: Building the Progressive Youth Movement.
That panel is our topic for tonight. Let me quickly thank Kath for inviting me tonight, and let's get started.
For those of you who weren't able to attend the convention and the panel, C-SPAN picked it up as one of 10 YK panels they taped. I'd hoped to be able to link you all directly to video, but the panel still hasn't aired yet so I've been unable to get a copy. Since I can't show you video, here's a quick rundown on the premise and the participants. I'm hoping we can go over this really quick and use that as a jumping-off point to discuss further.
Building the Progressive Youth Movement
The premise of the panel was this - since 2003/2004, we've seen a veritable explosion in the quality and quantity of organized progressive youth activism, particularly in the electoral arena (although not at all exclusively so). This is due to a confluence of factors - the perceived abandonment of young voters by the Democratic Party during the 80s and 90s; entrepreneurial activity on the part of Millennials - who are known for their civic engagement, team spirit, and creative energy - to fill that gap; a recognition among funders, particularly Johnathan and Peter Lewis, Skyline Public Works, and the Open Society Institute that youth activism is an important investment (ie funding projects to fill the gap); and the work of a few groups to document best practices and convince establishment types (campaigns, the Party, the media) that youth activism needs to be taken seriously.
In 2003/2004, these four factors, in various degrees, gave us organizations such as Music for America, The League, Punk Voter, Drinking Liberally, the New Voters Project, the Young Voter Alliance, and the Oregon Bus Project, to name a few. In 2005/2006 it gave is groups like Campus Project, Young People For, Young Elected Officials Network, The Roosevelt Institution, Forward Montana, New Era Colorado, and many more.
Collectively, I call this the [dot]Org Boom, and we've already seen the results of this new investment in youth organizing. In 2004, turnout among young voters was up 11% and young voters chose John Kerry over George Bush by 10% points. In 2006, young voters again increased our turnout numbers and this time we chose Democratic candidates by an incredible 60% to 38%. The Republican brand is crashing among Millennials, thanks to the ineptitude of the Bush Administration, an increasingly progressive youth electorate, and also the work of the many organizations I mentioned above.
If young voters vote for a party 3 times in a row, chances are they stay with that party for life (pdf). We're 2/3 of the way there with the leading edge of Millennials, but this is a never-ending process and we need to build the structures to continue to engage youth in progressive politics 5, 10, and 20 years down the road. The questions we now face are these:
- What, exactly, have we built thus far?
- Where are we still falling short?
- What can we do to bridge the gaps that still exist in this budding progressive youth movement?
During the course of the panel we had folks address #1 and #2, but we ran short on time and didn't get to drill down into #3 quite as much as I would have liked. Here's who spoke and a few sentences about what they said:
IVAN FRISHBERG - advisor to the John Edwards campaign, founder and board member of Young Voter PAC, founder of the non-partisan youth vote coalition and former the director of U.S. PIRG’s Higher Education Project. Ivan spoke about the history of the youth vote and how the PIRGs and New Voters Project joined forces with Gerber and Green (Yale Researchers) to document best practices in youth organizing and use hard data to convince funders, the media, and campaigns that youth organizing was worth a damn.
SHAUNA THOMAS - the program director at Young People For. Shauna spoke about the importance of building a "pipeline" for leadership training and development and the work of Young People For in that respect.
ADAM CONNER - fellow MyDD blogger, 2006 Young People For Fellow, and founding board member of the Roosevelt Institution spoke about his experience as a participant in many of the new institutions from the [dot]Org Boom and how radically the field of youth organizing has changed in the last four years. Of particular interest to me was his comments on the blogosphere and how, despite rising at the same time, the netroots and the new progressive youth movement operate on separate and parallel tracks - rarely intersecting. (For a primer on netroots vs. youthroots, check out these two posts I wrote this summer).
MATT SINGER - the C.E.O. of Forward Montana. Matt was my favorite panelist, as he spoke on issues of primary interest to me these past years: the importance of local work, how politics lost the "cool factor" (and how to get it back), and the challenges that many organizations face in moving from all-volunteer to funded/staffed institutions. (For some more on the cultural tip, check out these three blog posts and try to read Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, and The Conquest of Cool).
ALEXIS MCGILL - the Executive Director of Citizen Change, which ran the Vote or Die campaign in 2004, and the former Political Director for Russell Simmons and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN). Alexis spoke about the challenges we face in engaging young people of color - trust issues w/r/t the effectiveness of electoral politics at the national and state level vs. community organizing and issue-based work at the local level, and lack of funding among other concerns. (For more on this, check out this post on the Progressive Politics/Social Justice "Divide").
Unfortunately, we ran out of time during the panel and I was not able to ask a number of follow-up questions I had prepared for the panelists (we skipped directly to audience questions). There's already a lot to chew on here, but I think this might be a good forum to pose those questions as topics for discussion. With all this in mind, what are your thoughts on the following questions?
Partisanship
- Many of the groups I've listed are 501c3 "non partisan" organizations. How do you build a partisan movement out of non partisan institutions?
- How does the "post-partisanship of Barack Obama's candidacy fit into this?
Race and the Social Justice/Electoral Politics Divide
- To what extent are the funding problems face by groups that reach out to young people of color unique? How can we solve those problems?
- How do we overcome the trust and language (framing) barriers that separate electoral, progressive youth organizing from the more issue-based, community organizing by young people of color?
- What is the role of bridge groups like the League or DMI Scholars that seem to operate in both the (white) progressive politics world and the community organizing, social justice world at the same time?
Technology
- How can the progressive youth movement form stronger ties with the progressive blogosphere?
Culture
- What is the relationship of coolness to effectiveness, and what is the relevance for all parts of youth movement? (Indeed, all progressive organizing)
Funding
- Funding of youth organizing still seems cyclical. How can we be sustainable if the money spigot gets closed every two years?
- How do you convince young people to support the institutions that give them power in local and national politics?