Young Philanthropists

As a fundraiser, I always found events designed to cultivate people in their 20's and 30's to be a lot of trouble. Like most fundraising events, they succeed or fail based on the strength of the personal network of the person running them. My personal networks tended to have a lot of grad students and artists who liked cheap wine and cheese cubes well enough, but were in no position to be cultivated for philanthropic duty. They were cultivated anyway.

...or, another way to go might have been to look to the children of those who are currently running major foundations. On this subject, the New York Times sheds light. If you can get past the envy, it bears noting how new generations have very different ideas about what kind of organizations to fund, and how that funding should work. This connects to a number of recent discussions about how the rising generation "millenials" will change philanthropy.

To pull this thread a little farther: one of the ideas that stuck with me after hearing Ben Cameron talk last month was his claim that despite all the handwringing and justified grieving over the dire shortage of arts education in public schools, that the generation in school now is perhaps the most creative that the world has ever seen. They're not creating in art classes (which too often don't exist!), but they're creating with YouTube & Garageband. And yes, one of the big ideas we are hearing all the time is that new generations will expect not just interactivity, but co-creativity, or co-production of artistic work. To that end, another article from the NYT, this one on a "crowd-curated" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.