(This is the 4th post from Philanthropy Indaba client, Eva, blogging from her teaching internship in India.)
Generation Y loves reminiscing. We study protests and movements, yearning for a fervor we don’t naturally possess. We are anti nine to five, but pro-nothing. We sustain and buy locally grown produce, but apparently that’s all we can agree on. The children of flower children, we claim a unique understanding of the world but have a cultural Achilles’ Heel: we lack unity. We exist within emails and join forces through Facebook groups. We talk more than act.
As perhaps an unlikely foot soldier in the revolution (I shower and consume Starbucks), this is my call to arms. Back at School, on the heels of an empowering string of recited Obama-isms (Yes We Can), I spent the better part of my week compromising for money that wasn’t there, the corporations that halted their donations, the textbooks that are outdated, the complete lack of resources. Pencils are sharpened to their lead quicks before replacements appear. Children share five copies of novels I know sit on the shelves of all my friends, bought for our own education and then discarded to gather dust. My peers need to get it together. Our parents’ financial security (or lack thereof) won’t coddle us anymore, there’s no “someone else” to deal with no Social Security and tense foreign relations. We need to act.
We plead for world change from New York City soap boxes and from inside classrooms of liberal arts colleges, but simply talking for years after graduation won’t help. However, I’m finding that philanthropy of time isn’t enough either. I reread my previous blog entries and cringed. Money talks. Money is fast and easy. And money becomes necessary in a way time may not be.
My new branch of philanthropic theory courts both the granola sector of on-the-ground diehards in mud huts as well as the pearl and diamond crowd who throw Africa galas uptown. That is, those who write checks must join forces with those teaching in villages in India, or implementing clean water initiatives in Africa, disbanding coups in South America. ‘Philanthropy’ vs ‘Non-Profits’ should no longer connote separate entities. That’s maybe a mistake the generation above ours made – those on the ground eschewed those at black-tie fundraisers.
My generation must compose The Middle Ground, the Grey Area. In my mind, I call us Gen DIY. We must move beyond monetary stigmas. We’re all needed in order to fix what’s broken. The middle ground does exist—It’s me and the other volunteers at School who wear Birkenstocks and cashmere at the same time. We could have written checks from our parents’ accounts had the stock market not crashed, and so now we are here. There is no longer an older-and-wiser generation. There’s us, if we get over ourselves.
Money and time aren’t interchangeable in the way I once thought. My discovery is that money and time instead pitch for the same team. It’s possible to save the world with my own two manicured hands from a village in India.
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