In Spring 2008, the Breakthrough Institute will launch an initiative to engage leaders of the next generation. This project aspires to capture the present moment of opportunity for young adults to change our country's direction by offering a fresh, positive, inspirational approach to our challenges. Young people are better positioned today to advance an inspiring new vision for America than they have been for decades. We believe that by engaging the next generation with a new politics -- one that leaves behind the narrow, complaint-based focus of the past and embraces an expansive, aspirational politics of possibility -- we can build a vision to overcome our challenges and create a new American century.

Our generation is better prepared than any before us to overcome the complex challenges of our time. We have come to age at a time of rapid change, and we manage unprecedented complexity in our lives. We have access to profound depths of information and are interconnected in unimaginable ways. We are a creative, inventive, prosperous generation, and we have remarkable freedom to actualize ourselves and pursue each of our unique interests. All of our strengths make us the generation that can overcome the 21st century challenges and recreate the world.

We are grateful for the achievements of our ancestors and the prosperity they have given us. But when we look to the older generation for a vision of the future, what we find is disappointing and inadequate. Across the political spectrum, the older generation continues to offer the same old issue categories and narratives of denial, complaint, limits, sacrifice, and collapse. When older leaders do offer new ideas, they are narrow in focus and backed by empty promises. As a result, we find ourselves faced with a vacuum in national leadership that is diminishing our generation's opportunity to successfully confront this century's challenges and lead a prosperous future.

Breakthrough Generation aims to transcend the old generation's politics by creating a bold, expansive politics that leverages our generation's strengths. In contrast to the narrow, complaint, and limits-based focus of the past, this movement will focus on our opportunity to rise and our possibility to overcome. It will be led by a new generation of leaders who are hungry for a fresh, positive, inspirational approach to our challenges, and it will develop its capacity to become a key intellectual innovator and social advocator for young adults. Breakthrough Generation will seek to trigger new "thought movements" and student campaigns aimed at achieving four goals:

1. Bridge the gap between student intellectualism and student activism;


2. Develop creative solutions for a broad range of present and future challenges;


3. Engage young adults in defining a new generational politics that creates social and intellectual breakthroughs and advances a positive and inspiring vision;


4. Advance the interests of young adults on a national level.

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The action begins Spring 2008.

Breakthrough Generation is a new initiative looking for fresh ideas:

Contact us at generation@thebreakthrough.org


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Teryn Norris, Director
Email Teryn

Teryn Norris is the Founding Director of Breakthrough Generation, the youth initiative of the Breakthrough Institute. Teryn was previously a Research Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute and American Environics, where he co-authored "Fast, Clean, Cheap: Cutting Global Warming's Gordian Knot," a white paper on U.S. federal energy policy for the Nathan Cummings Foundation that advocates major public investments in clean energy. Its findings were published in the Spring 2008 edition of the Harvard Law and Policy Review.

Teryn studied political science and economics as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. He served as president of his class and in 2006 founded and led the Hopkins Energy Action Team, a student initiative supported by Energy Action and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network that won its campaign to achieve a university-wide climate policy. Teryn now serves as the student representative to the new JHU President's Task Force on Climate Change. During his sophomore year Teryn was Research Assistant to Dr. Steve H. Hanke, one of the world's most renowned monetary economists.

Teryn has also worked for the Sierra Club and Environment California, where he was involved in advocacy and fundraising for the California Global Warming Solutions Act. He helped organize Power Shift 2007, has written for Alternet.org, and blogs on ItsGettingHotInHere.org, WattHead, and the Breakthrough Blog.