Young nonprofit employees are bringing energy and leadership potential to the charity world, but they should take time to learn from their elders, says Audrey Alvarado, executive director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, in an interview on the blog Perspectives from the Pipeline.
In an interview with Rosetta Thurman, creator of the Pipeline blog, Ms. Alvarado says that members of Generation X and Y — people in their 20s through early 40s — “want to get things done quickly and innovate, finding alternative solutions that might work better for us all.”
However, she adds, “they may not take the necessary time to understand the full context of the problems they are trying to address.”
She counsels patience and a willingness to listen to the experiences of older nonprofit leaders, to glean their benefit of their experience. “If we dismiss people because they don’t understand how to hyperlink to a Web page (this may be way too self-revealing!) you may lose the opportunity to learn something from them because you discount them altogether,” Ms. Alvarado tells Ms. Thurman. “Look for ways to learn from them and appreciate what they may teach you.”
To find out more about the tensions between younger nonprofit workers and baby-boom generation charity leaders, see this recent Chronicle article.
