Millennials

The Millennials, or Generation Y, seems like a pretty special generation — a group of young people keenly aware of their connection to a changing world. And, whether it’s starting a business or working through a non-profit, they want to have a social impact. This is a series of stories, an arbitrary selection, about young people who’ve gotten involved and are trying to make a difference.

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April 25, 2012 | 12:10 PM | By

Infectious hope: When getting malaria makes sense

Flickr, Aya Rosen

It’s World Malaria Day. There’s been great progress against malaria over the past decade but most experts agree the best hope is to find an effective vaccine. Seattle Biomed is one of the world leaders in malaria vaccine research, but testing these experimental vaccines relies on people volunteering to get the vaccine — and get bitten. What it’s like to get infected for science.

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By Cyan James, special correspondent

Cyan James

Lane Rasberry wants to better arm the world against malaria

“I’m going to get infected and I’m going to love it,” Lane Rasberry says with a smile.

Rasberry is about to spend at least five minutes with more than a dozen mosquitoes full of malaria parasites.

The mosquitoes huddle in a screened, pint-sized container, waiting for Rasberry to roll up his left sleeve, lay his forearm over the container, and drape a towel over his arm to simulate night. Then they launch, feeding on Lane until their breakfast clock runs out.

A Wikipedia editor by day, Rasberry also volunteers in a malaria vaccine trial at Seattle BioMed, where he belongs among a unique group of clinical subjects who intentionally get infected.

Why? For Rasberry, it’s because the research is both altruistic and convenient, and because it plays to his interest in science. “I actually enjoy participating,” he says, emphasizing research trials’ ability to create community and help others learn about scientific advances. Plus, since he grew up in Texas, the mosquitoes don’t really faze him.

Seattle Biomed, Earl Harper

Mosquito dissection

After Rasberry’s five minutes are up, a technician dumps his mosquitoes into an ethanol bath to kill them, then flicks off the mosquitoes’ heads, presses their torsos to extrude their innards, and swiftly isolates their salivary glands.

Cyan James

Skeeter dissection

The technician scans the tiny sickle-shaped glands under a microscope, searching for P. falciparum, the parasite that infects up to 500 million people with malaria every year and kills nearly two people every hour.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Science, Cyan James, malaria, Malcolm Gardner, Sara Healy, Seattle Biomed, Stefan Kappe, vaccine
CHANGEMAKERS
March 30, 2012 | 2:00 PM | By

Changemakers: Dean Chahim seeks a ‘do-good’ revolution

Quick BIO: Dean Chahim, 22, is a cofounder of Critical Development Forum, a University of Washington graduate and recipient of a Bonderman Travel Fellowship.

“Changemakers” is our new series exploring how young people, connected and globally aware, are working to change the world. If you know a young person (think “Millennial” or “Gen Y”) committed to change, global health and the fight against poverty, please send the person’s name, short bio and contact info to Jake Ellison at jellison@kplu.org.

By Lisa Stiffler, special correspondent

Can Dean Chahim save the world?

Not alone, he can’t. But if he can inspire and educate enough people in “critical consciousness” – an awareness of the policies and practices that create injustices and an understanding of how we can change them for the better – that might just do it.

At age 22, he’s already off to an impressive start. While an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Chahim traveled to Bolivia, Nicaragua and Tajikistan.

His travels helped him recognize our shared humanity, and it highlighted the need for holistic, smart volunteer work that targets the fundamental causes of injustice. It also soured him on feel-good “voluntourism” that sometimes does more for the volunteers than for the community they’re trying to help.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Changemakers, Dispatches
December 7, 2011 | 11:00 AM | By

UW student activist calls on Millennials to be less dreamy, more political

Dean Chahim is a student of Civil & Environmental Engineering and International Development & Social Change at the University of Washington. Chahim co-founded and facilitates the Critical Development Forum, which is having one of its informal forums later today on the issue of climate change.

This is a guest post and the views expressed here are Chahim’s, in case you needed to be told that.

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Dean Chahim

A UW student at an Occupy Seattle event asks for less hope, more action

There is the social and political movement of Occupy Wall Street. The Arab Spring. And then there is Seattle’s exploding ‘humanitarian’ community. These are all driven, in part or maybe largely, by the younger generation’s desire for change – for a better world.

At the University of Washington, it’s impossible to miss what’s happening. The youth movement for change operates under many banners and goes by many names: development, humanitarian, philanthropic, global health, global service, social entrepreneurship. Here on Humanosphere, this has been described as a key feature of my “Millennial” generation.

New student-run NGOs seem to start here every week. Information sessions pack in students by the dozen. Flyers litter campus for the latest two-week trip to empower African villagers, help with sustainable projects, and oh yes, see a few waterfalls. They seek to work miracles, changing communities forever “in just five days.”

In between volunteer trips, they might send shoes to the Dominican Republic or bras to Nigeria. Yes, bras. Gently used bras.

There is no denying that some of the work they do has real benefits in the short-term for the poor and marginalized globally. But I would argue that many of these well-intentioned efforts don’t have much impact – and that they distract from the most powerful means to fight poverty and inequity, disease and suffering.

Politics.

I’m concerned that the way we frame our discussion around these efforts is actually stunting my generation’s view of social change. We dream of helping “one village at a time” through service overseas when, arguably, we could help many millions more through political activism here at home. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Critical Development Forum, Dean Chahim, Millennials, Occupy Wall Street, UW
April 14, 2011 | 10:55 AM | By

Connected, aware and committed to change

I forgot to tell you earlier why I gave this series of stories about the Millennials its title:

Connected to change.

Maybe it’s obvious, but the first point here is that this generation, also known as Generation Y (though I’m told they don’t like that designation … too close to Generation X), is connected. The impact of the web and other information technologies on this generation is no small thing.

“Our phones are always ringing or sending text messages,” said Autumn Lerner, a Millennial who is vice-president for Seatte’s World Affairs Council. “Most of us don’t know what it’s like not to be this connected.”

And this connection is not trivial. Some experts say the current turmoil in the Middle East likely would not have been able to take off, grow so fast and maintain its momentum without the web, phones, Facebook and other instantaneous means of communicating. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Bottom Billions, Millennials, World Affairs Council, YPIN
April 13, 2011 | 7:30 AM | By

Millennials doing microfinance and microphilanthropy

Millennials are big on microfinance, and microphilanthropy.

Microfinance is most simply thought of as providing — and managing — small loans or financial services to poor individuals or small communities who otherwise wouldn’t ever get on a regular bank’s radar screen.

Microphilanthropy is similar — philanthropy aimed at helping meet the needs of poor individuals or small organizations that otherwise might get the attention of many large non-profit, humanitarian organizations.

There’s a crisis of confidence in microfinance right now, usually, inaccurately, personified in the recent trials and tribulations of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus.

The real crisis is not so much about Yunus as it is due to the rising commercialization and emphasis on profits in this financial scheme. Yunus has criticized some microfinance organizations for acting like “loan sharks,” for losing their focus on the true mission of microfinance — to help people get themselves out of the cycle of poverty.

Here are a few young people in Seattle who remain focused on the true mission.

1) Using tech-industry know-how to help the smallest needs: Nadia and Adnan Mahmud.

The Mahmuds are two impressive and almost accidental microphilanthropists. Their organization is called Jolkona, Bengali for “drop of water,” and until this past March was being run on laptops out of the Mahmud’s kitchen and assorted Seattle coffee houses.

Tom Paulson

Adnan and Nadia Mahmud, of Jolkona

Jolkona was created, I’m not kidding here, partly because Nadia didn’t want to walk back to her dorm room at UCLA and partly because Adnan didn’t want to deal with a lot of email. I’ll get to that in a second, but first let’s talk about what Jolkona does.

In a nutshell, Jolkona helps fund those kinds of projects or individual needs that are so small that the cost to administer them at most large non-profit organizations would be more than the amount of money needed. Jolkona also provides direct feedback so donors can see how their support makes a difference.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Jolkona, Lumana, microfinance, microphilanthropy, Millennials, Vittana
April 12, 2011 | 9:00 AM | By

Five Millennials on global health

Global health is a big deal in Seattle.

As a matter of worldwide significance, it is of course a big deal everywhere — by definition. But what I mean is that global health is today the cause célèbre for Seattle and throughout the region. It’s especially popular among the Millennials.

“Global health is the movement of our generation,” said Kristen Eddings, a program associate at the Washington Global Health Alliance and one of the primary organizers of a big global health shindig in Seattle coming this June known as Party with a Purpose.

More on Eddings and that party later. First I’d like to introduce a few other members of the movement:

Sarah Dawson

Sarah Dawson at eye clinic, Burma

1) Sarah Dawson: Burmese refugees and Seattle undergrads.

Dawson is a 21-year-old student at the University of Washington, a senior majoring in public health and Spanish. She already speaks Thai. Dawson helped launch the UW’s global health minor and wants to do something in the medical field.

And, in her spare time, she works on the Thai-Burma border helping refugees with emergency assistance, defensive training and human rights’ violations documentation.

“I’m most interested in maternal and child health issues,” she said.

Wait a minute. Before we get into the global health stuff here, what about that last bit that sounded like special ops?

Dawson used to live in Thailand, where her mother and uncle have established a humanitarian organization called Free Burma Rangers that works with refugees inside Burma (aka Myanmar). The Burmese government is not too keen on the organization, to put it mildly.

“We have some tense situations at times,” said the understated Dawson. She described one episode last summer that involved some gunfire, a fast hike through the jungle and a lot of, yeah, tension. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, global health, Millennials, Party with a Purpose, UW
April 12, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

Connected to Change: The Millennials

Flickr, TheeErin

The millennials

I didn’t notice it at first but there’s something pretty amazing going on with young people today. The Millennials, aka Gen Y.

They are socially motivated. They are globally connected. They don’t just want change. They see it as necessary to their, our, survival.

Yeah, I know someone is always saying that there’s something unique, or special even, about the up-and-coming generation. Such categorization, age-based compartmentalization, can be tiresome.

We all know about the Baby Boomers, my generation, and that they still think they’re special. My parents came in just at the tale end of the so-called Greatest Generation — so called largely because they actually didn’t appear to think they were special at all. They just buckled down and got the job done.

Let’s face it: Trying to generalize about a group of people who just happen to be the same age is a pretty risky business. Most Baby Boomers don’t seem that special to me. And not everyone in the Greatest Generation was that great.

To look at the Millennials (see photo above), you might on first glance think they are just engaging in the latest version — though more digitized — of the same old American lifestyle of consumerism, self-centered careerism, a sense of privilege and the national pastime of generally ignoring what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Chances are, you would be wrong.

At least, that’s what I have discovered as a journalist covering matters of global health, global poverty and development in and around Seattle. I am constantly running into the most amazing young people!

As the book Generation We put it:

The Millennials are a special generation, potentially the greatest generation ever. They are not pessimistic or vengeful. Rather, they are sober in their view of the world. They believe in technology and know they can innovate themselves out of the mess they are inheriting. They believe in entrepreneurship and collective action, and that each person can make a difference. They are about plenitude, and they reject cruelty. They are spiritual, responsible, tolerant, and in many ways more mature than their predecessor generations. They reject punditry and bickering, because they are post-partisan, post-ideological, and post-political. Most important, they believe in the greater good and are ready to dedicate themselves to achieving it.

Today, and for the next few days, I’m going to describe some of these people. It’s an arbitrary selection and in no way represents everything going on even in our community. But it will give you a sense of what I claim is, in fact, a pretty special generation — and a group of people keenly aware of their connection to a changing world.

The Millennials.

Let me know if you know of a global Millennial. Post a comment, or your own story.

FILED UNDER: Basics, baby boomers, Generation We, Millennials, young activists
April 11, 2011 | 2:08 PM | By

Why young people are flocking to global health and poverty – a series preview

For the past few weeks I’ve been talking to young people, mostly around Seattle, who are involved in global poverty issues. And I’m blown away by the number of initiatives being pursued by people in their 20′s and early 30′s.

freestylee/Michael Thompson/flickr

  • A fellow heading to Mongolia to work on microfinance
  • A young Bengali couple who have started an organization to fund smaller projects that often get ignored
  • A woman who plans to work at the International Criminal Court on women’s issues

Others have noted this before, but my conversations have certainly shown it’s true: There’s something special about this generation, Gen-Y or the Millennials. They are much more internationally aware than many of their older cousins or parents, and they are very socially motivated. Whether it’s starting a business or working through a non-profit, they want to have a social impact.

I’ve written about the networking that’s happening in Seattle, creating more of a shared sense of effort or momentum, through the “Party with a Purpose.” I think the individual stories, of young people who’ve not only gotten involved but are making real progress, are more powerful. Stay tuned (and click on the “Millennials” link for more stories).

FILED UNDER: Justice, DIY aid, Millennials, Party with a Purpose, young activists