Don't force us back in boxes! Kristof, young social entrepreneurs and "Remix" culture

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published November 16, 2008 @ 10:28AM PT

In his second column about social entrepreneurship this election season (click here to read the first), Nicholas Kristof writes today about Talia Leman and the new social entrepreneurial spirit among American youth.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Talia started a program to get young people to trick-or-treat for coins to donate to Katrina relief efforts. The program took off, garnered national publicity, and ended up raising more than $10 million. Since then, Talia has founded Randomkid.org to help her peers find support for their own big ideas to make the world a better place.

Kristof rightly recognizes that there is a spirit of social entrepreneurship among young people today. Part of it is that while young people have always been creative, the language of social entrepreneurship seems to give shape and context to their creative volunteerism. But part of it is also that young people today have grown up in a culture permeated by rapid innovation. These are people who have grown up with the internet and iPods and have a hard time believing that if there's a problem, there isn't a solution to be had.

The question is how we will nurture this spirit and help it translate it into real impact. Some, including Ashoka's Bill Drayton, worry that we encourage our children to be too passive and not assert real leadership. "How to Change the World" author David Bornstein wonders if the intense academic pressure in top schools crowds out time for philanthropic experimentation.

For my part, I think there's a larger generational gap that could stiffle the spirit. Its the gap identified by the generally brilliant Lawrence Lessig in his new book "Remix." The general argument of the book is that society is "waging a war on our kids in the name of the 20th Century’s model of “copyright law."" Young people today tend to see culture as a process of iterative co-creation. Take the best of what's here, add it to something going on over there, and you've got a new product, a new song, a new solution to an old problem.

One of the ways this worldview manifests itself is that young people feel less constrained by the traditional boxes of "nonprofit" vs. "for-profit." We like the idea that our consumer dollars can be part of the same social missions that animate our volunteerism. We like integration across the "boxes" of our lives, and don't want to be pushed back in them.

What does this mean practically? How do we nurture the spirit of social entrepeneurship? It means the sort of legal changes that Lessig is pushing for, along with more legal dialogue around hybrid legal structures for social benefit creating for-profits. It means universities should devote more resources to interdisciplinary and co-curricular learning. And it means that if the Obama administration follows through on its national service plans, they should not create artificial boxes and instead embrace the variety of methods through which young people are trying to create change.