Why are so many Gen Y’s Social Entrepreneurs?
This is a comment I originally posted on The Suddes Group post about Generation Y and Social Entrepreneurship. Why do YOU think this movement is growing?
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It is exciting to see so many people living their passions and being willing to work towards the changes they want to see in the world.
I agree with Teju that connectivity is a key to this movement, but I also think it is a few generations of “having enough to live”. My mental image of what the 40’s and 50’s was like has a lot of people working hard to improve their lives. Those people were less able to think globally about change as they had the goal of improving the future for their own children in mind. For many of us, our grandparents (or parents) worked hard to send their kids to college and made sacrifices to do so. Many of our parents were raised with enough to eat and a chance to study – perhaps with a mindset of more would always be nice, but we don’t have to worry about how we are going to feed the family. In many cases, they DID make more, and they continued to set their goals higher and higher. A lot more of the next generation which you are writing about, grew up in American or Canadian or British communities surrounded by people who had a lot, but were still fighting for more. Seeing that on TV, in out media, and in our suburbs from a young age makes you wonder if that is really worth growing up for.
I grew up in a suburb, on what my mom refers to as the “teacher street”. My mom is a teacher and so many others on our street are two. “Tiny” houses amongst monstrosities. It’s not until you grow up, go further down the street, or down the continent, into the cities or rural areas or anywhere that does not have a public school which sends a half of its kids to Ivy League schools, that you realize, I’m lucky. Like Teju said, all we have to do is search the internet to realize how much we have and how reliant our lives have become on those who don’t. We realized we don’t NEED to keep fighting for more for US.
Why not make a future for ourselves which allows us to do something we love while fighting that age old battle of making the world a better place for our kids. Lucky for many of us, we have the luxury of knowing we will always be able to find a way to make money to support our own kids, so we can turn outward towards the world and rejoin the fight for the future, this time with all of the worlds’ kids in mind.