Intergenerational leadership

reasons for coming:

• supporting transition to younger generation
• removing the intergenerational gap
• supporting younger people
• transition to newer and younger people
• adapting existing practices for younger people - younger peoples mental models for technology
• student organizing groups
• bridging gaps in academia and activity and educaito nmovements
• software freedom lacks younger voices - related to younger peoples mental models, activists aging out
• dealing with burnout and stress of older people - sharing power and social capital
• environmental justice - preserving movement history (archiving, oral history, digitization, documenting history on wikipedia)
  • getting young people more involved
  • how to connect across generations, while honoring elders and their lives spent in the movement
  • respecting young peoples role in seeding movements and their political contexts

challenges of doing intergenerational work

• generational communication, learning styles
• older people don't have confidence using tech
• older people discounting their personal stories and experience
  • not sharing their own stories and humanizing themselves
• resourcing to pay youth interns
• cultures of adultism and ageism
• learning political organizing
  • nonlinear learning
• can worship youth for better or worse
• elders need training in bringing people in and up to speed
• young people not taken seriously when they do take lead
• hard to transition relationships (funders, how do they engage?)
• collective memory - erasure of stories of the older people
• burnout from elders
• social capital
• generations on different platforms
• tokenising youth/ minorities
• a generation of organization was not paid
  • it's different now
  • tension of paid/ not paid
• tensions of working in NGOs/ nonprofits
  • power dynamics that hurt organization
• lack of leadership skills in nonprofits
  • we have good loud voices, but a lack of leadership skills

opportunities

• let young people do oral histories on tiktok
• helpful for young people to build confidence - a practice of giving young people responsibility, taking bottom line important tasks
• succession as a pipeline for leadership
  • these can focus on external skills, leadership etc, but not operations
• younger folks more open to talking about emotions
• sharing experiences in a more casual and colloquial way, removing power dynamics
• create family spaces
• introducing movement builders and humanising them for the younger generation
• "my civil rights movement is not your civil rights movement"
  • how to share back and forth in this
  • how do we talk about this as a protracted struggle
    • how to keep this narrative running
• facilitated leadership
• these movements are for communities to have more autonomy

stakes

• organizational trustworthiness
• Red Scare - severing the movement

Books

• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
• No More Heroes