Justice Matters Institute is a social justice organization whose mission is to develop visionary solutions that move us toward social justice and to develop people with the capacity to carry out these solutions.

 

In It for Life: Investing in Young Leaders for a Better Society

Justice Matters Institute is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that offers a leadership training program for college students committed to social justice issues. Through this program, we learned about the many barriers that college students face as they pursue making a contribution through meaningful life work. This report documents these barriers and puts forth solutions. We gathered information through interviews with students from our program, as well as interviews with staff on college campuses and other people with expertise related to our focus. We also reviewed related studies and other literature.

Findings: Barriers to Pursuing Meaningful Life Work

We found that college students encountered three types of obstacles to pursuing work that enables them to make meaningful social contributions:

  • Lack of Resources – this lack includes insufficient support on campus
    for exploring these kinds of careers, as well as the problem of low
    salaries in the nonprofit world
  • Nowhere to Turn, No One to Trust - the resources that did exist
    lacked relevance, trustworthiness, and credibility
  • Dilemmas After Graduation - discouraging incidents in the work
    world raised further difficulties.

Seeds of a Solution

The report examines a variety of programs, each of which contains seeds of a solution for effectively connecting young idealists with meaningful life work. These programs address how to build youthful idealism into a lasting commitment: being “in it for life.”

Justice Matters Institute’s Community Fellows Program
This program for college student activists helps them overcome many of the barriers they encounter on campus. It provides validation for their aspirations; it helps them reconcile career options with values and integrity; it provides a sufficiently trustworthy and intensive resource; and it helps them to re-establish their sense of hope and will to persist. Of the Justice Matters “Fellows” who are out of school and working, 96% hold jobs in which they are making a social contribution.

Public Service and Civic Engagement Initiatives in Higher Education
These initiatives help make college campuses places that support students in serving the community and becoming active citizens, yet have not done well in supporting two key groups: students of color and students committed to social justice issues. These groups—students of color passionate about making a difference in the issues that affect their communities, as well as students of all races with a developed commitment to a just and fair society—bring great energy and commitment to addressing social problems. While we must learn how these initiatives have been effective, we also must explore the ways in which they fail to reach important groups of young idealists.

Conservative Organizations
These well-funded organizations that have invested heavily in idealistic conservative young people provide some examples of what might be possible with greater financial resources.

Young people are ready to take on the social problems passed down to them. If we take the steps to consciously and thoughtfully support them in making a path to their life work, their talent, energy, vision, and insight will reward our communities for years to come.