A Final Reflection as Generation Citizen’s CEO
I first co-founded Generation Citizen (GC) more than twelve years ago, as a senior in college. Leading GC has been exhilarating, exhausting, rewarding, meaningful, and so much more.
I’m proud of the work my team and I have accomplished, excited to see where the next generation of leadership takes the organization, and buoyed, as I was when I first founded the organization, by a deep belief in the possibility of democracy, and in the power of young people. While I will miss the work itself, it is the people who have defined this work that I will miss the most: our staff, Board, educators, young people, and partners.
I have a myriad of reflections as I leave the CEO role, and hopefully some are helpful- to those that follow at GC, to others in the public good arena, and to young people. Here are some:
Believe in democracy: I founded and ran an organization focused on creating a more just, equitable democracy. But in a moment in time in which the very concept of democracy is at risk, I believe more than ever in the promise of the idea. For me, this fundamentally means I believe in the ability of individuals, from diverse backgrounds, creeds, and belief systems, to come together, and work to achieve better for the common good.
This belief in democracy is at the core of the tenets of GC’s work. GC, as an organization, has always been only as good as the sum of its parts, of the people that comprised our own democracy. We’ve been successful only to the extent to which every constituent, from our staff to our students, to our teachers and supporters, felt like they had a voice in the direction of the overall organization. For this collection of voices strengthens our organization.
A perfect democracy, in our country, or in our organization, is probably never achievable. At the same time, a better, more equitable democracy is always worth striving for. To that end, we kept trying to improve, and we will keep trying to improve. That concept, for me, is the core of democracy: a realization that perfect will never exist, but a belief in trying to constantly improve.
Scale Isn’t Everything; Impact Is: For far too long, success for non-profits has meant a focus on scale. How can we reach more people? More students? More teachers? Part of this is inherently logical: when you are trying to solve a problem, the more people that can have access to a solution the better. And during my tenure at GC, we served over 100,000 students across the country. There’s pride in that.
But there is no non-profit that exists that will ever reach every needed stakeholder. There is no way that GC could ever reach every student in the country directly. And I worry that thinking that we even should is a manifestation of a sense of organizational ego. We got into trouble thinking too much about scale: telling our story through numbers and endeavoring to reach more and more students. The result was an organization that had compromised its own organizational culture, experienced burn-out, and wavered from the quality that was core to our work.
I would rather focus on scaling impact. How can we show the power of an in-depth model of Action Civics, and scale that idea around the country? How can different organizations adapt aspects of our model and make it their own? How can nonprofits across sectors work more collectively to solve the problems, rather than as competitors? We need to scale and share ideas, rather than scaling products.
Center Equity at the Foundation: Our entire country is currently in the midst of a much-needed racial reckoning. For far too long, GC, like many organizations, treated issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion as boxes to check rather than foundational to the actual work itself. We formed committees on the topic, we tried to diversify our staff, we had conversations internally. That’s not enough.
We live in an increasingly diversifying country that has not yet fully grappled with the real history of race, or democracy- one of constant exclusion and inclusion, one that still oppresses too much of its population.
We made an intentional decision to center GC’s entire work on racial equity as an end goal, not as an ornamental approach to the work. Our curriculum, teacher training, and advocacy approach aims to approach DEI work as foundational. We’re moving closer toward this goal through our new strategic plan, and I know our leadership will steward us more forcefully in that direction.
Listen to young people: More than anything else, I feel a deep sense of gratitude. Gratitude in having the opportunity to build an incredible organization. Gratitude in meeting so many wonderful people along the way. Gratitude in that I feel, and hope, I made some sort of difference, even if that difference is small.
I leave GC with the same belief that I held when I started the organization twelve years ago: that young people represent the best path forward to a better, more just democracy. Nothing has meant more to me the last few weeks than hearing young people sharing how much GC has meant to them. Their relentless push for a more just society, their ability to envision democracy for what it can be, rather than what it is today, will always give me hope.
I am so proud of what we accomplished over the last few years at Generation Citizen. I cannot wait to see what GC accomplishes over the next 10 years. And I can’t wait to see the next generation steers us to a better future.
