Just Fix It!
The twentysomething rebels' battle plan is to repair the damage their elders wrought and chart a new course
New York biochemist Sonserai Lee, 29, started the nonprofit Knowledge Recovery Foundation, to preserve indigenous medicinal practices. The Korean-born daughter of two doctors (her father practices both Oriental and Western medicine), Lee has built a computer repository of ancient-but-dying-out knowledge from Mayan healers to Chinese herbalists. Lee hopes her "bridge of information" may one day help scientists develop new antipregnancy drugs or find the elusive cure for crack addiction.
They seek service to community. The Vietnam generation idealistically thought it could change the world. But the post-boom generation focuses more realistically on easing smaller, community problems. "Young people sometimes think problems are so big that they can't do anything about them," says Vanessa Kirsch, 27, who started Public Allies, a national youth apprenticeship program. "But they think if I can just do something in my neighborhood, to work at a nearby nursing home or help out at a soup kitchen, I can make a difference." Polls show a recent, steady increase in voluntarism, which David Battey, 29, who started the national Youth Volunteer Corps, says is a backlash to the materialism of the Greedy '80s. "People in our generation want to do something they can believe in," he says.
Among the most community minded are minority youths who have reaped the benefits of post-civil-rights-era opportunities. Many, like recent Harvard medical school graduate Cheryl Dorsey, 29, see the vacuum of opportunities offered other minorities and devise their own solutions. Dorsey started the Family Van, a mobile health unit that drives around Boston's poor Roxbury and Mattapan neighborhoods where residents often have no transportation to clinics and hospitals. Michael Canul, 23, started a program to take minority kids in San Jose, especially those from gangs, around to university campuses to get them thinking about going to college. Public schools, because of budget reductions, have cut back on counselors. So many students "don't know about financial aid, many have never heard of the SAT," says Canul, whose mentors walk students through the application process. "There is a real, future social cost to not getting involved," he says.
The new service ethic is entrepreneurial, notes Ed Cohen, 50, whose venture-capital firm started the Echoing Green Foundation, which, although small, has become the pre-eminent funding catalyst for the twentysomething nonprofit groups like those begun by Kopp and Kirsch, as well as giving out fellowships to help innovators like Dorsey and Canul. "In the '60s these people would have gone into government," says Cohen. "Now they are inventing their own institutions to change the world."
They are post-partisan: Ronald Reagan was the first president these young people learned to love. The 18-to-24 age group was Reagan's strongest in the 1984 election. But George Bush did not hold the group's affection. This year young people were attracted primarily to Bill Clinton (21 percent of his total came from 18-to-29-year-olds), who, like Reagan, represented change. "We're very impatient with those who simply talk, talk, talk and do not deliver on their rhetoric," says Watson, who decided to perform his own little political revolt.
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