Corporate Social Responsibility is headed for a Millennial Revolution. So is philanthropy.
Why?
There’s an easy answer:
Millennials need to be more meaningfully engaged than many programs allow for.
But it’s much deeper than that:
Many can’t understand why doing the right thing is an add on and not part of the underlying business plan to begin with.
They’ve got questions:
They wonder just how much celebrating a brand should be doing about incremental change brought about by small bits of good work done here and there, especially when the brand is in part causing a problem (environmental, social) that their CSR program or someone else’s needs to address.
And concerns:
They also think that existing CSR programs aren’t about meaningful change but distraction.
They want more out of the brands they work for and do business with.
We should too:
We’ve left them quite the mess to clean up.
A NASA funded study recently predicted the fall of humanity soon caused by over-consumption amongst elites.
Institutions like banks are raking in record profits. In the US, big corporate CEO’s make about 350 times as much as their average worker.
But their parents are making less and less or have had to take less meaningful work. Income inequality abounds.
They’re drowning in student debt:
They are the best educated generation ever, and the one least likely to have a better standard of living than the generation before.
They don’t trust institutions:
But they do trust each other. And Twitter because it lets them communicate with each other, usually away from the eyes of their parents (who are on Facebook) and corporations (who are being sold their information by Facebook).
We didn’t quite get them:
When this generation first started entering the work force, there was a lot of hand wringing about how Millennials had abandoned institutions and all that was good with the world.
In fact, they have not. It is the institutions that have abandoned them.
We kinda had it wrong:
Millennials will reject what seems hollow or disingenuous or ineffective.
They will create their own institutions to replace the broken ones where they can.
And they may bring new definitions of profitability to the institutions and organizations they reimagine.
They will fundamentally revisit how CSR programs work and demand more of themselves and each other.
And us.
And that could be good for us all.
Susan McLennan
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