I subscribe to Google alerts for a number of issues, including discussions on “Generation Y” or the Millennial generation.

In today’s alerts, I received a link to a post about how the Millennials are volunteering around the world. Read it here (or a summary below). There are some great links to reports on this. This certainly links in with our experience and research. These young people are going to change the world!

For information about volunteering in the UK, check out DirectGov and Worldwide Volunteering as examples of companies and governments encouraging volunteering among young people.

The Millennials are coming!!

Millennials (or Generation Y), the generation coming of age in the new millennium, have been derided as having “helicopter parents” being “boomerang kids”, having an excessive sense of self-worth and generally being a pain in the butt in the corporate world.

But they are also volunteering like mad.

USA Today reports that they volunteer more than any previous generation and the Wall Street Journal reports today that corporations are finding that one of the best ways to attract them as employees is to offer them paid time off to volunteer.

The Millennials are the children of the Baby Boomers, the generation that I argue is fueling a Second Great Wave of Philanthropy. They don’t have the assets yet to be a force in philanthropy on the donation side (although Resource Generation is already organizing those that do), but the way that they will interact with and view the nonprofit sector is being defined right now.

You can read about this group on the excellent Future Leaders in Philanthropy blog (co-founded by my sister who no longer writes for it). And now you can follow the role of Millennials as “social citizens” at the aptly named Social Citizens blog.

Authored by Kari Dunn of the Case Foundation and Allison Fine, an author and experienced blogger, Social Citizens is a blog discussion focused around the Social Citizens paper that Fine wrote for the Case Foundation.

Source: http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2008/04/millennials-as-social-citizens