Case Foundation: How did you develop the concept for Mobilize.org?

David Smith: Mobilize.org (founded as Mobilizing America's Youth) was created after a successful statewide lobbying day in California. With a handful of students working together for about six months, we were able to achieve a $130 million victory. After being surprised and amazed that our voices were actually heard, we decided that we wanted to share our model and story with other students and young activists around the nation.

We looked carefully at the youth civic engagement field and tried to support the work already being done out there. Most of this was youth voting work, with organizations like YouthVote Coalition, New Voters Project, Rock the Vote, and Hip Hop Civic Engagement Project leading the way. We noticed that with this focus on Election Day, there was little focus on the other 365 days a year. We found our niche focusing on engaging young people in public policy.

Over the past five years, we have taught hundreds of workshops, organized annual conferences, produced the Mobilizer's Guidebook (a best practice publication), and built the Youth Policy Action Center (an online policy and direct advocacy resource). All of these projects have had the same goal of educating, empowering, and energizing our generation to be more civically engaged, specifically by being involved in public policy development and advocacy.

Case: Why do you think a large percentage of youth participate in volunteer service, yet only a small number are active in more traditional forms of civic engagement, such as voting?

Smith: First off, I want to refute the claim that young people do not vote. In 2004, the youth vote (18-24) surged 11 percentage points to 47% of eligible citizens, and nearly 21 million young people (18-30) showed up to vote -- an increase of almost 3 million over 2000. In 2006, we continued this trend, and in 2008 we anticipate a continued increase in young voters rushing to the polls.

However, studies have shown that youth volunteer their time for community service at a higher rate. I feel that this is due to the immediate satisfaction that volunteering gives a servant. When you do direct service, you are able to see the results of your hard work immediately, and this fulfillment helps you feel accomplished and willing to do it again.  Voting, and other systemic forms of engagement, are not as fulfilling, as you have to wait to see what changes come, the candidates or initiatives you support often lose, and the policy changes often don't appear to have immediate results.

Mobilize.org has been working on showing young people how public policy impacts our lives, and conversely, how we can impact public policy. This is similar to how service learning helps young servants find the root causes to the problems they are addressing through their service. However, we try to take the next step and have young people help devise a long-term policy solution to our community's most pressing problems.

Case: In launching the Democracy 2.0 campaign, you speak of a desire to highlight the Millennial Generation's "distinct characteristics." What do you believe makes this generation different than previous ones?

Smith: After our Democracy 2.0 Summit on October 3, 2007, I'll be able to speak with greater confidence about how this generation characterizes itself, but in the meantime, I can share my personal opinions, which I've formed through observing tens of thousands of young people over the past five years. A mentor of mine, Scott Beale, wrote a book called the Millennial Manifesto, and I think it gives a good account of what defines our generation and what issues are most important to us as well.

However, I think one of the largest contributing factors to the development of our generation has been the influence of the Internet and technology. Many have called us the "dot com generation" or "Internet generation," and I think there is some truth to this, but beyond just using the Internet, I think our generation lives by similar rules to those that "govern" the Internet.

One of those first rules would be the immediate rejection that anything really "governs" the Internet, just as our generation will buck any titles or specific definitions. I think this comes from the diversity of our generation. This diversity includes and transcends much of the traditionally collected demographic data. Sure, our generation is diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and political partisanship (with the plurality refusing to identify with either of the two major parties), but I think larger values that come out of this are tolerance, open-mindedness, and embracing of differences. For this reason, I think "defining" our generation is a difficult task.

One other rule or characteristic I'd like to point out is what drives the rapid expansion of the Internet: user-generated content. Web 2.0 is all about users interacting with sites and creating their own content (such as blogs, profiles, social networks, photo/video sharing, etc). Democracy 2.0 borrowed this language as we were looking for "citizen-created democracy." I think that the diversity of opinions and respect for these opinions uniquely positions our generation to ask for more voices in the process with a focus on the wisdom of the crowd.

There are a number of others, so I'd stay tuned to the results of the Democracy 2.0 Summit. I encourage any readers to feel free to contribute their own thoughts of defining characters of our generation on our blog at Mobilize.org.

Case: The Party for the Presidency will celebrate young leaders who demonstrate a "citizen-centered" approach to civic engagement. How do you define this approach, and why do you think it's important?

Smith: As I mentioned, with Democracy 2.0 building on Web 2.0, we are looking to upgrade our democracy to allow for and encourage more citizen input in the process. We are not calling for a direct democracy (at least not at this point), but we are calling for more citizens involved in identifying local problems, proposing local solutions, and playing a role in the implementation process. We often rely too heavily on our elected officials to do all of this on their own and then complain when they don't meet our expectations. We are calling on our generation, and citizens throughout this nation, to play an active role in our community's decision-making processes.

Personally, I think that citizen-centered means that process begins with looking deeply into what our citizens need, want, and will support. This does not mean take a poll with biased language and then use that statistic to rationalize legislation. This means setting up an intensive process that allows at least a representative group of individuals the opportunity to voice concerns, hear each other's points of views, and play a role in prioritizing the problems and potential solutions for the community.  

This process is quite rare right now and is mostly being championed by nonprofit organizations. However, this is an area in which our government and media outlets should have a great deal of interest. I would hope that as more tools are created to facilitate such dialogues and technology develops to allow for more deliberative democracy, we will see our elected officials and members of our media rising to the occasion and hosting these events in town halls and city centers around our nation.

Case: What advice would you give to a young person who feels that their voice doesn't matter or isn't being heard?

Smith: In the final episode of the first season of West Wing, President Bartlet is addressing a group of college students, and he says, "Decisions are made by those who show up."  This was the exact same advice I received when I went to my first meeting with a state legislator.

Sure, when you show up to vote and every one of the people and initiatives you vote for loses, it gets disheartening and you want to give up. However, our political processes do respond. They just take a little time, and that's one thing that our generation has -- time.  We are going to be around for the next 50 years and we will be leading our nation's decisions within the next 20. When you are persistent and diligent, you will end up having many successes and be able to change the county in which we live.

One example was in this past election. (And I say this coming from an "all-partisan" background.) Young people showed up in large numbers and actually made the difference in at least six Congressional seats and two Senatorial seats. By making a difference, I mean if the youth vote were to have split 50-50 with the incumbent and challenger, six more members of Congress would have held onto their seats, and control of the Senate would not have changed hands.

However, young people showed up around a couple of key issues, one of the top ones being college affordability. This issue drove thousands of young voters to the polls in key districts and ended up changing the makeup of Congress.  

More importantly, Congress heard us and they responded. Within the first 100 hours, they passed a bill slashing student loan interest rates in half, and over the course of this year the College Cost Reduction and Access Act was overwhelmingly passed by both the Senate and House and is expected to be signed by the President. This legislation moves about $20 billion towards grants, subsidized loans, and keeping student debt manageable for recent graduates. This is a huge victory that was championed by students over very powerful banking lobbyists.

This is just one example of a federal policy that was passed because our persistent voices were heard. There are thousands of examples on the state and local levels of how young people's voices are rising above the buzz of local politics and making a genuine difference. Mobilize.org works with hundreds of youth to help make their campaigns as effective as possible, and many more stories can be found on our website.