At 18 years old, Amy Lien Cross can already be called an activist and a grant maker.
Amy, who lives in Chicago, is president of her school’s chapter of Amnesty International,
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a member of the Chicago Youth Council -- a new, city-run program to involve high-school students in local public-policy issues -- and lends her time to advocacy groups, including the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
She has also participated in Sisters Empowering Sisters, a two-year-old grant-making program for teen-aged girls run by the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation, in Chicago. As part of the program, Amy helped to give away more than $10,000 to charity last year.
Despite her youth, Amy’s experiences and interest in philanthropy are not so unusual. The high-school senior is one of a growing number of young people who are being trained and encouraged by charities and foundations to do charitable work. And Sisters Empowering Sisters is one of the many emerging programs in philanthropy around the country that are seeking to get young people more involved -- as decision makers, fund raisers, or key volunteers.
“For the first time in the history of our country, we are looking to kids starting at age 12 and 13 as real philanthropic assets in our communities,” says Joel J. Orosz, a program director at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, in Michigan, who specializes in youth philanthropy. “We no longer see kids as only consumers of philanthropic largesse.”
And as more kids are exposed to philanthropy and more actually participate in it, the influence on the non-profit world could multiply exponentially, Mr. Orosz and other observers say.
Studies show that adults who participated in charitable activities when they were young volunteer and donate to charity at a much higher rate than those who didn’t.
“The fundamental change is yet to come,” says Steven Culbertson, head of Youth Service America, a Washington coalition of youth-service organizations. “The experiences young people are gathering now mean that in the future, as they get older, we’re likely to see much more progressive and involved people in positions of power.”
Leading the charge to get more youngsters involved in philanthropy are groups like Do Something, in New York, and Youth on Board, in Somerville, Mass., which have sprung up in recent years not only to encourage young people to volunteer, but, perhaps more importantly, to push more non-profit groups to open their doors to them.
Says Karen Young, founder of Youth on Board: Charities “are beginning to learn that including young people is a way to come up with positive solutions to social issues, to get fresh ideas, and to use new energy and insight to tackle problems.”
Grant makers like the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation are taking the lead, too, by supporting programs that train young people in philanthropy. New York’s Third Wave Foundation, for example, takes young people on annual retreats to teach them how to be effective donors. And through a matching-grant program, the Kellogg Foundation encourages community foundations to train and involve teen-agers in fund raising and grant making.
But even as more charities reach out to young people, the growing appeal of philanthropy may be coming from the kids themselves. Observers note that kids today are much more knowledgeable about social issues than kids were in the past -- in part because so much information is available on the Internet -- and thus more motivated to become involved. Community-service requirements and school classes that teach youngsters about civic involvement and volunteerism may also be boosting interest in charitable work. In addition, the observers say, more young people simply may be acting on their natural tendencies to try things in new ways and to follow the example of peers.
“Young people are closest to many of society’s problems and they recognize that,” says Michael Sanchez, co-founder of Do Something. “They are also recognizing that they have so many ideas and, because they see other young people trying to make a difference, that they maybe can make a difference, too.”
Each year, Sisters Empowering Sisters works with a small group of girls ages 14 through 18 to teach them about grant making and how they can make a difference in their communities. The girls take classes from foundation officials and complete a research project related to an area of grant making in which they are interested.
After the girls’ training, the foundation gives them money to award to programs developed by and for the benefit of girls. The young grant-making teams design a request for proposals, review grant applications, make site visits, and make final decisions on where the money should go.
Last year, Amy and her peers awarded a total of $10,346 to nine organizations, including $880 to the Illinois Center for Violence Prevention for a program that sends girls in the eighth and ninth grades on an overnight retreat with older teen-aged girls. During the so-called lock-ins, the girls discuss issues including those related to gangs, sex, violence, self-worth, and volunteerism.
Amy says that it’s a “great feeling” to be trusted by the foundation and to be able to give money to charities that she believes are deserving. And, she says, the foundation benefits, too, from the experiences and wisdom of the girls.
“We see what would work, what would be unique, what would be fun,” she says. “We can see what would be effective based on how we might react or how our friends and people we know might react.”
Morenike Cheatom Basurto, head of Sisters Empowering Sisters, says that the purpose of programs like hers is to help kids “see the value of philanthropy, the power of positive change through money, charity” -- and to offer young people lessons that they can carry “through the rest of their lives.”
