Future 5000, the largest online directory and network of progressive youth groups in the country, was collaboratively designed by the organizational members of the Generational Alliance (GA). The youth civic engagement field is fractured among at least four distinct sectors: community-based youth organizing, campus organizing and leadership development, cultural organizing and non-campus voter organizing.  The GA creates opportunities for these sectors to build relationships and collaborative projects towards the development of a long-term strategic and integrated movement for social change.  Future 5000 is the GA’s “movement mapping” project.  It is designed to strengthen our networks, maximize our resources and leverage community power. 

 Future 5000 members get:

Ownership:  From crisis response after natural disasters to coordinating direct action for immigrant justice, members will decide how to use Future 5000. This is an especially exciting opportunity for groups without a strong independent web presence.

Access: Organizations working on the same issues will be able to easily share information, strategies and resources. Obvious strategic alliances will be easier to build, and unlikely ones will be easier to imagine.

Recognition: By collecting and centralizing information, Future 5000 makes member organizations easy to find. It’s like a virtual spotlight on the work our members do — work that too often goes unrecognized.

Future 5000 has joined with two other progressive movement-building web projects, myBLOC.net and the Online Media Resource Center, to form the M-TECH Collaborative.  The collaborative is working to integrate the functionality and user communities of all three sites. 

M-Tech has a holistic understanding of the role of technology within community work. Rather than replacing on-the-ground organizing, we are committed to building open-source, participatory and democratic technology that is youth and community driven and that supports face-to-face organizing and builds on existing relationships. These shared values and commitments are our basis of integration. 

WHAT WE NEED:

 Our primary resource needs are stipends for interns and/or a half-time support staff person to help with website maintenance, content development and user outreach and engagement.  

 

We also require additional resources to complete our release two plans for the website. 

Based on the objectives of F5000 for 2007, the key development requirements are:

• Online reporting mechanism that allows the admin to download and report data about the organizations that have profile in Future 5000.
• Develop a simple mechanism to allow users/organizations to create reports about other organizations and their members and download that information in a format that they can use for mail outs or reports.
• Improve Chaski to send out segmented communications to organizations and their members.

Location