I agree, it’s 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.

Thank you for this great post and for mentioning Sparkseed. You’re right to point out that this is an exciting time with lots of opportunities for young social entrepreneurs. Right now there our student innovators dreaming up the next Kiva, Better World Books, etc. They need our help. It’s inspiring to see For Impact, Unreasonable Institute, Think Impact (http://www.thinkimpact.org/), StartingBloc (http://startingbloc.org/) and others join together to add momentum to this movement.

I think the emergence of information and communication technology has truly transformed our sense of community. Benedict Arthur proposed the idea of “Imagined Communities”, in which people can exist in community with others they never meet. Humans first experienced this phenomenon just after the printing press developed. As literacy spread, people could read about others in their community they had never met – their struggles, their triumphs, etc. And they began to care about them. It’s this concept of “imagined communities” that led to the formation of nations. And today, it’s this concept that allows us to connect with Haitians, Somalians, and Iranians. Because we’ve grown up in an age of unprecedented human connectivity, I think young people today know they can’t take the reins of the earth unprepared to tackle the world’s greatest problems.

Combining this sense of community with emerging ideas about entrepreneurship’s application in combatting poverty, and we’ve got a veritable force of nature on our hands in this young generation.