New trend of coworking

The Harvard Advanced Leadership Fellowship offers a year-long program to enhance and leverage the skills of experienced leaders who want to apply their talents to solve significant social problems. At the same time, Harvard Business School will supplement the salaries of selected new graduates who choose to enter the non-profit world. Students at many universities involved in social change initiatives are being mentored by experienced executives. Programs like these are active at Duke, Stanford, Virginia, and elsewhere, and the University of Utah just received a $15 million gift to launch a social entrepreneurship initiative with a similar mentoring component. DoSomething.org is the country’s largest nonprofit for young people and social change. They have 1,425,974 million members (and counting) who focus on causes they care about. Imagine what can happen when you link their energy with the deep networks of late career business people! What the tech industry often forgets is that with age comes wisdom. Older workers are usually better at following direction, mentoring, and leading. They tend to be more pragmatic and loyal, and to know the importance of being team players. And ego and arrogance usually fade with age. During my tech days, I hired several programmers who were over 50. They were the steadiest performers But how opportunities to work creatively with people from other generations? Let see [http://www.littlekidsrock.org] It is an active partner to the young social entrepreneurs who work there, and they in turn rave about all they’ve learned from the wisdom and experience he brings. Millions of similar partnerships are just waiting to be launched at nonprofits across America. Some questions about this trend that nonprofit leaders might ponder include: What new ways can we explore to make cross-generational linkages more quickly and easily? How can social media tools like Facebook and LinkedIn get involved? What can universities do to connect their student and alumni networks? What about hosting meet-up gatherings? Could a “matchmaking” system modeled on one of the successful dating services be created? What opportunities are there for cross-generational collaboration on an international scale? I am starting to see business people in India, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, and many other countries becoming interested in increasing their involvement in social causes. How can we bring them into our networks along with the thousands of bright young students in those countries? How can we highlight more stories of cross generational partnerships to show how they can work best? I have gotten a lot of joy out of mentoring, partnering, and sharing with people who are discovering the excitement of social engagement, including both those of my own cohort and those just starting their careers. Finding ways to bring these generations together could be a big step toward building the even more complete teams we need to address the toughest social issues of our day.