Social Citizens Blog

Today’s guest blogger is Zach Maurin, an AmeriCorps alum who co-founded and co-directs ServeNext.org. Recently, ServeNext completed a 30-city, 60-day Greyhound bus tour across America to unite citizens to advocate for the expansion of national service programs. The tour was just featured by the Chronicle of Philanthropy: Road Trip With a Mission: Expanding National Service

Eighteen months ago I started an organization, ServeNext.org, with a couple of friends to help put national service expansion (AmeriCorps, City Year, Teach for America, etc.) atop our country’s to-do list. Our strategy, from afar, is simple: unite a critical mass of constituents who, through collective action, can advance national service legislation.

Starting ServeNext poses a lot of challenges that I expect and welcome: strategic planning, fundraising, and the like. But there is one challenge that I did not expect: keeping up with and strategizing around the social web.

Read more

The Causes application on Facebook celebrated its one-year anniversary last week. I had a chance to catch up with Joe Green and Sean Parker, the founders of Causes (previously known as Project Agape), this week at the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy conference.

They told me that in the first year Causes registered 12 million users who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. $2.5 million has been raised for about 20,000 nonprofits. Facebook reports 60,000 daily users of the application. They also launched Causes on MySpace a few months ago, and about 25,000 people are using Causes on that platform.

Pretty impressive first year, guys!

Today is World Malaria Day. And you may be wondering why that’s relevant on a blog about Millennials. Malaria is a disease that the world has known how to beat for more than a century, yet each year an astounding 350 to 500 million new cases are reported and over 1 million malaria-related deaths occur.

Read more