One of the things I enjoy most is highlighting stories of Gen Yers that are making an impact by doing things differently. In my January blog titled “How Gen Yers are Reinventing the Future” I was highlighting a speech given by Rachel Botsman at TEDx Australia. She gave a fascinating talk about collaborative consumption and you can read about it in my January 24th blog. A few days after I posted the blog, I received a comment from Jonah Halper letting me know about another talk from Nancy Lublin that I would probably find interesting. As it turns out, I’m a big Nancy Lublin fan so I went to visit the site to see her talk.
When I got there I was more curious about the site itself than Nancy’s talk (it’ll be our secret..). As it turns out the name of the site is “NextGen:Charity.com” and what a great concept they have. The description on the site explains what they do better than I can so here is what it says, “NextGen:Charity is a conference on non-profit innovation aimed to help you run your organization more effectively and efficiently, and connect with donors and your community more powerfully”. The Gen Y founders, Jonah Halper (my blog commenter), a professional fund raiser and marketer and Ari Telman, an award winning comedian & founder of JCORPS, an international volunteer organization, joined forces & started NextGen:Charity.
Here’s the beauty of their idea. They saw the power & following that the TED talks generated & wanted to bring that to the non-profit sector, which as I can attest, needs it desperately. Visit their site & see the sponsor lineup supporting them: Fast Company, AMEX, Pace University. Not too shabby, huh? Then there are the speakers: Seth Godin, our friend Nancy Lublin, and many more top name experts in the non-profit world.
The NextGen:Charity conference event takes place in NYC on November 17&18 but the founders have Meetups scheduled all across the country from now until the summer. Cool idea and worth attending if you’re in one of the cities: DC,Boston, Miami, LA & Chicago.
For all my non-profit friends & clients, check out the NextGen:Charity and block those dates.
NextGen:Charity is just another example of Gen Y’s creativity at work. It also showcases their innate desire for collaboration and helping others/giving back. So next time you think Gen Yers are lazy & unmotivated, think of Jonah & Ari & think again.
Oh and BTW, I did get to see Nancy Lublin’s video & it was very good — I knew it would be.