GES2009 Opening Keynote: A New Story About Our Generation by Nathaniel Whittemore

In the late 19th century, the United States of America was a society of deep contrasts. On the one hand, the titans of industry had unleashed the power of manufacture and catapulted the young nation to the top of the international economy. The Carnegies and Rockefellers had created wealth on a scale never before seen in human history.

At the same time, America's increasingly urban society heaved under the pressure of low wages, terrible working conditions, overcrowded living, lack of sanitation, and a host of other social issues that ensured that the prosperity of the Gilded Age was only skin deep.

Around the turn of the century, a young woman from Chicago began building what would became Hull House, a type of refuge designed to support the urban poor in a way that treated them like citizens of a common nation rather than wards of an unequal society.

Indeed, Jane Addams, hesitated to call her work "philanthropy." She worried about, as she called it, "an unconscious division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped."

The context that she placed her work in was nothing less than democracy itself, because for her, democracy was the force through which the talents, dreams, and passions of all would be unleashed to create a more just, equitable world. Democracy not only enabled but required that everyone have the chance to make the most of their opportunities:

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life... we have not yet learned ...that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

Addams would go on to be one of the leaders of the progressive reform movement that ushered in a more equitable 20th century and would become the first U.S. woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

We begin this Global Engagement Summit a century later at a time when the patina has been scratched off of our own Gilded Age. Decades of largely uninhibited growth have indeed created new wealth and helped bring millions out of abject poverty. But as has become clear in the last six months, they have also corroded our understanding of value and our ability - or willingness - to guide the market's invisible hand.

GES begins at a time when no one is quite sure what will happen next or precisely how we will work our way out of crisis. Yet what does seem clear is that the institutions and orthodoxy of the 20th century are not equipped for the century ahead.

We debate education reform policy, but even our functioning schools prepare people for an industrial economy on life support, all too often stifling passion along the way. We elected an upstart president who shouldn't have had a chance, but we still have a toxic political funding system that rots the ability of congress to think beyond the next election cycle. The rhetoric of globalism and human rights are ascendant yet our international institutions are impotent. The question of whether the unregulated free market or the planned welfare state is the best vehicle of freedom and prosperity is largely resolved, and the answer is, of course, neither. The dogmas of the quiet past, are, as Lincoln so poetically put it, simply inadequate for the realities of the stormy present.

The question then becomes, what is next? Why should we hope?

But to quote Addams once again: "What, after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities and courage to advocate them."

I love being alive right now. Right now. Because despite the endless repetition of foreclosures and botched bailouts that cloud our news; despite the very real pain and injustice that remains all to common; despite talent denied the chance to thrive the world over, today is more full of potential, passion, and opportunity than any day before it.

And that's what I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about a new way of seeing. I want to talk to you about our collective moment and the commitment and creativity I see bursting from every corner of this planet. I want to tell you a new story about our generation.

In 2004, I found myself in Cairo, Egypt for a semester abroad. It was after 9/11, a year into the Iraq war, and I was skeptical of the dogmatic us, them, clash of civilizations mindset that seemed to be in style. I wanted to see it for myself.

Egypt was not a random location. My parents had visited Jordan, Israel, and Egypt when I was only three, and just after the start of the first intifada. Their stories introduced me not only to the majesty of history, but of our power to destroy - and often to destroy in the name of the good. I would find an Egypt just as confusing.

Almost from the moment I arrived, I loved Egypt. I loved the layers of history embedded in the very buildings themselves; I loved the passion of constant conversation. I loved the cab drivers who consoled me and my American friends the day after George Bush was re-elected.

But at the same time, my Egypt was not just about Pyramids and politics. In 2004, the violence in Darfur had just flared up and I began volunteering with refugees from the horn of Africa as a way to "do my part." It quickly became the most important part of my week. I spent as much time as I could tutoring English at St. Andrews, a small sanctuary from the cacophony of the outside world.

While I was captivated, I was also appalled. There is no place where I've felt the injustice of opportunity denied quite as oppressively as among the refugees of Cairo. Brilliant, talented, compassionate people are left to languish, denied the basic rights of employment and education. An entire generation of Sudanese youth have grown up outside of any systemic support. And if the Egyptian government's treatment of refugees isn't deplorable enough, the rest of the world treats Cairo like a convenient dumping ground, progressively reducing the number of refugees we allow to cross our borders.

It was the first moment that I felt the seemingly immense gap between my desire to do good, and my ability to actually impact global problems.

History is full of moments in which young people, confronted with the immensity of injustice, have paused to wonder just what to do.

In 1785, the world was another place entirely, particularly in the fact that the vast majority of the global population lived in bondage and servitude. Freedom, not slavery, as historian Seymour Drescher put it, was the peculiar institution.

This was the world in which a young Anglican student with fiery red hair entered the most prestigious academic contest of the day, the Cambridge Latin Essay contest. For two months, a twenty five year old Thomas Clarkson researched the ins and the outs of the slave trade, in an attempt to answer whether or not men had a right to keep one another in chains.

He poured himself into the task with ferocity. When complete, his essay railing against the trade won first place. As he rode back from Oxford to London the day after triumphantly receiving the award, he was overcome by the magnitude of what he had learned. Try as he might, he could not just think away his essay as an academic exercise.

As he paused to sit under a tree, he thought to himself with characteristic simplicity: "if the contents of [the] essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end."

Clarkson would become the key catalyst for the first great wave of the British abolitionist movement, arguably the first mass movement in modern history where people advocated for human rights that were not their own. Against economic self-interest and centuries of history, a motley assortment of Quakers, women, rightless laborers of the early manufacturing class, and former slaves themselves shifted the entire sentiment of a nation. In the scope of just one lifetime, Britain went from the world's largest slave trading nation to global policeman against the trade.

Clarkson was the chief organizer, and as so often happens, was lost to history in favor of heroes with stories more easily told. He was not, for example, the parliamentary voice William Wilberforce, hero of the recent Hollywood production "Amazing Grace." Instead, Clarkson was person who drew all of the strands together, from the theological imperative of the Quakers who were the earliest abolitionists to the movingly articulate stories of former slaves.

He connected them into a movement that resonated with the real lives of people as they were lived. His role was to help people understand their own connection to the injustice and use their particular position to do something about it.

The magnitude of the abolitionists' accomplishment still stands today. As historian Adam Hochschild wrote, "Once awakened, a sense of injustice is something not easily contained." Not only did the first generation of British abolitionists become a model for their American counterparts, they invented or refined virtually all of the techniques of organizing we still use today - from consumer boycotts to traveling exhibits to legislator report cards.

Unfortunately, as I wrestled with frustration in Cairo, I did not yet know about Thomas Clarkson. Instead of looking back for inspiration, I did what it seems so natural for our generation to do. I jumped on Facebook and asked which of my friends had felt the similar contrast between their desire and ability to do good.

By the following summer, those short messages had turned into a full-fledged global exploration. Almost a dozen of my friends and I traveled to, between us, almost forty countries, along the way staying with as many young changemakers and nonprofits as we could.

The trip, which we dubbed "Just Naïve Enough," took me personally to the Balkans, through the Middle East and into East Africa. On the one hand, the stories I heard and the people I met were incredibly inspiring. Students in Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo trying their best to build their own version of a peaceful pluralistic civil society; Israelis and Arabs of all backgrounds unwilling to accept perpetual violence as the natural state of things; my Cairo refugee friends still struggling against all odds to create meaning in a world of chaos; the citizens of northern Uganda who despite twenty years of the most arbitrary and pointless war still organize themselves to protect and provide the most basic rights and services for their communities; and the Rwandans who after living through one of the most brutal and depraved moments in human history still believe in the capacity of people to be good. These things are inspiring. They give us cause for hope.

But what I felt, more profoundly at the time, I'll admit, was an overwhelming powerlessness. The magnitude of the injustice made me feel small. My mind could hardly grapple with the horror so many of the people I spent time with had seen, making it difficult to truly appreciate, in my guts, their incredible resilience.

When I heard stories like that of the Rwandan mother who, after almost three months of successfully hiding herself and her children, made one final trip to try to find her son fresh fruit rather than the beans he hated, only to be murdered in cold blood for no conscionable reason, it shook my faith in people.

Perhaps hardest of all was the trail of frustration among those young people trying to make a difference. I felt in them, as I had felt myself, the chasm between our desire and ability to change the world. Whether they worked in their home community or adopted community, people recognized that they needed help, support, skills, training, something to really move the dial, but they just didn't know where to get it. And neither did I. I returned from that trip feeling more bleak and pessimistic than ever before.

This was the context in which the Global Engagement Summit was born. What had started as a training event quickly took on a much bigger meaning. I wanted to believe in my generation. I wanted to believe that we were smart enough, self-critical enough, committed enough, pragmatic enough, innovative enough to change the world.

But I still remember feeling so nervous the night before the very first event. My team had poured themselves into building an incredible program, but still I worried. My great fear was not about capacity but about flippancy. I was terrified that these students that we had brought from all over the world would take this as a chance simply to see the city, drink a bit, and congratulate themselves for their wonderful intentions. I worried what this would suggest about my own commitment.

What I found instead was the generation that I had been looking for. That first group of delegates and indeed, each since, were, as I had been, humbled by the magnitude of the poverty, injustice, and inequality in the world. They were clear-eyed about their own limitations, indeed, the limitations of the nonprofit sector on it's own to truly change the structures of oppression that deny talented, passionate people around the world the opportunity to thrive and create meaning.

But from the very bottom of their being, they were unwilling to accept the world as it is as the natural state of things. They were unwilling to accept that injustice should be anything other than aberrational. They were unwilling to accept incapacitation and were hell-bent on discovering the power in themselves and in others to make the world a place where all could thrive. They understood, as Jane Addams did, that in today's world, "Action...is the sole medium of expression for ethics."

These were people like Caitlin Cohen, a student from Brown who has spent the last four years since the very first GES forging alliances between communities, international nonprofits, and the government to create a comprehensive, citizen-led health system in Sikoro, Mali. People like Rolf Garcia-Gallont, a Guatemalan student at Duke who returned to his home country after graduation in order to help train entrepreneurs how to fully harness microcredit to unleash their own potential. People like Hany Amin, who's brother Ramy joins us this year, who sees the very best potential of Egypt, that confusing place where my own journey started, and is working to build equitable health access for the poor.

I have names and stories that could go on literally all night. This is the story of our generation I want to tell. Not because I wish to exalt us for goals we've yet to achieve, nor because I wish to deny the very real forces that make it easy for our generation to feel entitled and disengage.

It's the story I want to tell because it's the story so many of us strive for. There is a Jewish saying, "What is truer than truth? The story." When it comes to who we will be, the more aspirational question of "who we wish to be" often reveals a truth deeper than truth.

The generation I see wants to be the generation that ends genocide, and poverty, that reverses the calamity of global climate change, and ushers in an era in which all have a chance to find their passion and thrive. Will we be that generation?

We have some advantages. There are profound shifts happening in our world, some of which we are driving and some of which we are uniquely positioned to harness to create good.

There is an increasing recognition that disease, poverty, environmental catastrophe and conflict do not respect the lines on the map. The only viable future is a future of global cooperation. Period. The internet has given our generation access to people and ideas from farther away than ever before and as a group, we are predisposed to the sort of collaboration - indeed the physically remote, globally-minded collaboration - so necessary today. When I think of this, I think of the project Ushahidi, an open source, real time crisis mapping tool - designed to dramatically increase our ability to respond to emergencies - currently being built by web developers in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and of course, Orlando, Florida.

There is an increasing recognition of our collective need for empathy. Part of our new globalism is an understanding that we cannot simply deny injustice perpetrated against someone else as somehow removed and disconnected from ourselves. There are significant signs, such as growing rates of volunteerism and studying abroad, that our generation seeks actively to understand, rather than hide itself from, global plight. When I think of this, I think of my friend Susannah who despite constant doubt and the emotional trauma of seeing continues to fight for rights and resettlement for Cairo's displaced.

Along with this, our general conception of the poor is changing radically, as well. While the dominant paradigm of poverty relief has been for decades, the division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped that Addams had worried about, that is increasingly shifting. With a greater opportunity to actually spend time with and learn from those experiencing the problems of poverty and inequality, it becomes harder and harder to explain them away as somehow fundamentally different, or less deserving of the chance to make the most of their own capacities. Young people look more and more to "engagement" opportunities that transcend charitable service.

When I think of this, I think of Kiva, whose president Premal Shah is our closing keynote. Kiva gives average citizens the power to extend the right of credit to small business entrepreneurs around the world, unleashing opportunity and fundamentally shifting the way the rich world views its own relationship with the billions who make up the so-called base of the pyramid.

There is a growing belief that unflinching ideology and orthodoxy of all stripes do not serve us, and that our future lies in a pragmatic, active pluralism. Having grown up with both the idealism of the 60s and the skepticism of the 80s, young Americans are increasingly distrustful of monochromatic views of the world, no matter what perspective they represent. Young people from other parts of the world have seen all too clearly their own forms of hypocrisy and broken promises and tend, at least in my limited experience, to be similarly disinterested in theories that calcify to gospel truth rather than serving solely as guiding principle. When I think of this, I think of my fellows in the social entrepreneurship movement, Alex, Amy, Blair, Aden, Abby, Jacob, Charlie, and more who you'll meet this week, who are moving environmental and social value back to the center of our "business" calculations.

And despite the utterly atrocious state of our national and global education systems; systems which I would argue systematically crush passion and creativity in the name of preparing people for jobs in an antiquated industrial economy; the countervailing power of the internet has helped us become arguably the most creative generation in history. The lowered barrier to production of media - whether it's art, music, language, or video, mean that we are constantly remixing and iterating upon each other's culture in the new global commons. As those who know me or who have spent anytime with my blogs can attest, the latent power of an iterative, creative view of the world fills me with more hope than almost anything else. When I think of this, I think of the GES staff, from Emily and Rajni right down to the nervous freshman who turns up at the activities fair not knowing what to expect, who create an entire subaltern education for themselves, not in the name of grades but in the pursuit of understanding.

But the true power of our generation; the greatest gift of our parents who encouraged us to question authority; the very thing that the cynics will try to tear down at every chance; the single, bedrock element of our generation's particular way of seeing that truly has the power to change things, is our unflinching belief that we can change things.

At the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship a few weeks ago, leadership professor Roger Martin argued that the most common characteristic of exceptional leaders - not good leaders, but exceptional leaders - is that when presented with opposing and undesirable options, their tendency is to reject the premise of the choice and find a superior path forward.

Tonight, I told you stories from history for one simple reason. We are - everyone in this room - the inheritors of a legacy that respects no boundaries of race, gender or faith. It is a legacy that does not belong to any single leader or any single movement.

It is the legacy of people who, like Jane Addams, when confronted with magnitude of inequality and humanity's terrible capacity to destroy, refuse to believe that injustice is natural. It is the legacy of people like who have, like Thomas Clarkson had, a sheer, fortitudinal belief in our potential to shape a society driven by the better angels of our nature. It's the legacy of people who despite nights, weeks, even decades of doubt, never stopped believing that they could change the world. While some might call this arrogance, I call it being Just Naïve Enough.

This is our legacy. This is our story. Every day I meet older people, family, friends, mentors, absolutely stunned by how young the members of our movement are. They're so used to the old, tired trade off between passion and selling out; they're used to idealism deferred. They often feel, to quote Bob Dylan, that "People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent." But cynicism has gone out of fashion, and they're looking to us for leadership. The moment is ours to create.

Our obligation is to find our passion, and to unleash the passion of others. Our responsibility is to remember that systems of oppression were created by people, and so too can people undo them. Our hope is to never stop believing that we can change the world, because we must.

To end with one final quote from Jane Addams: "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt."

Find your story, and thank you for listening to mine.