The Center for Community Change’s Sally Kohn has a piece today about the passionate Millennial activism that is taking place online and the extent to which it happens off line.

We’ve kinda heard this complaint before with Thomas Friedman’s Generation Q piece that slammed the Millennial Generation for not being disgusted enough by our contemporary world to take to the streets. In Mike’s rebuttal of the piece and indeed many of us who spoke out against Friedman’s uneducated assumptions, it isn’t that Millennials aren’t taking to the streets, indeed they are, they are just virtual streets

Kohn is bothered by the virtual part. She agrees that young people feel “deeply connected” with causes - things going on in Darfur, Tibet, you name it…. Bus she fears the online activism will “erode the community values [Millennials] seek”

“On the one hand, they have grown up with new technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each other and the world around us…

But social movements are based on collective action. The American Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every significant social change movement in between and since has relied on community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to challenge the status quo.”

Kohn says that the internets are very individualistic. Seems Kohn hasn’t heard of Web 2.0. I don’t know about ya’ll but we are collectively communicating right here on the tubes. And this blog is fed into facebook - which if you haven’t seen it is this SOCIAL networking site where all these people who went to school together, work together, or associate in the same causes collectively chill together on line.

For example, Invisible Children started out just on MySpace and Facebook, living through social networking sites, this organization brought awareness and action to a cause among an age specific group of people. Now, young people are serving to help walk these children to safe houses daily, people are donating online, showing the film, and raising awareness about something no one was talking about a few years ago.

IC isn’t the only one. Save Darfur is another cause that I hardly think would have the passion and power that it does today without a mobilized group of people online. If you look at online donations on Change.org or the FB Causes application you see that Save Darfur has raised $2,657 on Change with 1997 actions and $24,000 on the Causes Application on Facebook.

Young people have a lot of power and that power can take place on-line or off, each action is just as valid and just as powerful and appreciated. No one should be allowed to get away with diminishing that.

Time has indeed been flying by here at HeadCount - we are a month into our touring season, but it feels like we’ve been on the road forever!

Over the past month, we’ve had teams on the ground and on the road with the Dave Matthews Band, Jack Johnson, Pearl Jam, and Ratdog. We are about to hit the road with John Mayer, O.A.R. and STS9 in the upcoming weeks as well - there will be plenty of opportunities to volunteer, so do be sure to sign up to do so! It’s the work of the amazing volunteers who come out to see us night after night that has helped us register thousands of fans over the past month!

Our first leg of Jack Johnson wrapped up in Minneapolis about a week ago. We came just shy of getting 1,000 people registered to vote over our first five dates, and recruited several hundred new volunteers as well - we hope to see you all out at a show soon! Jack himself has been super supportive - coming out to greet our volunteers on a few occasions, and even giving us a shout out from stage in Minneapolis! We’re pretty eager to get back out on the road with the All At Once Tour once it comes back to the US in August.

Our Dave Matthews team is still braving scary weather, but they are pulling through - we haven’t even hit the halfway point of the tour and have already gotten over 3,000 DMB fans registered to vote! Our touring crew even got a chance to meet Dave, and were pretty pumped by his support and interest in our work.

Pearl Jam is wrapping up their tour tonight in Boston - Amanda, our HeadCount touring rep is tired, but still sad to see the tour end! We are wrapping up with close to 1,200 Pearl Jam fans registered to vote and committed to hitting up the polls this November. Shout outs from Eddie have also been a nice bonus along the way!

Our Ratdog team of Sara and Lizzy got started in Oregon last week. They are on a west coast run, having already hit up Eugene, Seattle, Boise, Salt Lake City, Sacramento and Los Angeles. They have a few more stops before their tour wraps up in Northern California next week, and have gotten several hundred Ratdog fans registered to vote along the way!

Be sure to check back for more updates from our on the road teams, and you can check out more tour photos here. And don’t forget, we need you to VOLUNTEER! Sign up today!

Beginning July 1st, the first phase of largest college aid expansion in six decades kicks in, according to a release sent out from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. This was part of the number of bills pushed through Congress in 2006 when the New Direction Congress rolled into town.

In efforts to help middle class families live more affordable, the House passed, among other things, a minimum wage increase as well as the the expansion in college aid which includes an expansion of Pell Grants as well as this reduction in interest rates which will cut in half by 2011 and will begin with a drop from 6.8% to 6.0%.

According to the release

“This cutting of the interest rate will benefit the 6.8 million students who borrow need-based federal student loans each year. Once fully phased in, this interest rate cut will save the typical student borrower – with $13,800 in need-based student loan debt – an average of $4,400 over the life of the loan.”

Thanks to the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which provides more than $20 billion in federal student aid over the next five years, interest rates on need-based (subsidized) federal student loans will drop from 6.8 percent to 6.0 percent on July 1st – making these loans more affordable for millions of low- and middle-income students. This is the first of step towards halving these interest rates – over the next few years these rates will continue to decrease until they reach 3.4 percent.

Low and middle income students and families benefit most form this plan as 6.8 million students borrow need-based federal student loans each year.

other benefits they can begin receiving this fall. For the 2008-2009 school year, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act will also increase the Pell Grant scholarship by $490 (raising the maximum award to $4,731) an provide up-front tuition assistance of $4,000 each year for students who commit to teaching high-need subjects in high-need public schools.

Just wanted to let everybody know that HeadCount ended up registering 1,145 people this weekend at Bonnaroo. This was a record breaking weekend for HeadCount and a sign of how far the organization has come.

We are extremely proud of all the volunteers that came out this weekend. We had an incredible team of 9 of our best volunteers. It was also extremely moving to see people who had already payed for tickets come to the booth, grab a clipboard and help us out.

While the HeadCount volunteers worked hard canvassing out in the campgrounds, stages and tents; the booth also received a great deal of traffic. People were determined to find our tent and register. This was a great example of how motivated young people are these days and a sure sign that the live music community will be well represented at the polls come November.

Headcount is back out at Bonnaroo this year in full action! In addition to our all star team hitting the ground and registering voters – we’re at 700 currently, getting dangerously close to our 1000 goal – Headcount co-founder Marc Brownstein has also been on site and was featured on a panel on Friday.

Our team in Mansfield includes Shane, our RC for the Midwest, Dan, our RC for the upper Midwest, Dan’s brother Gabe (who, is, we understand, engaging in some friendly competition with his brother when it comes to registrations…), Andy, Stacey, Kelly, Jennifer and Celeste - all volunteers from the Nashville HC team, and Jessica, HeadCount’s Regional Coordinator from the south. We are also joined this weekend by members of HeadCount’s core national team, and by members of our touring teams who have stopped by to help. It’s been a lot of fun to get to work with such awesome people, and to talk to countless fans about the importance of voting and ways that they can get involved with HC.

More updates coming soon – and more Bonnaroo photos can be found here!

The past few weeks have been busy here at HeadCount – our volunteers have been hard at work in their communities registering lots and lots of voters, and our touring teams have hit the road in full force, getting hundreds of people registered to vote and involved with HeadCount along the way!

Erin, Ashley, Stephanie and Ethan are our Dave Matthews Band touring team for the first leg of the tour. They got started two weeks ago in Pittsburgh and have been braving rainstorms, heat and long drives ever since. Bad weather hasn’t gotten them down though – they’ve gotten well over a thousand people registered to vote just a few weeks into the tour and are getting more and more people involved every night! They’ll be in Hartford this weekend, and working their way to Darien Lake and Boston next week.

Our Pearl Jam tour kicked off this week in Florida. Amanda is our touring rep, hitting the road with the band in style as a part of their touring crew! Her and her volunteer teams got the tour off to a great start in Palm Beach and Tampa, getting hundreds of PJ fans registered to vote and informed about Headcount. A big ‘register to vote with Headcount’ shout out from Eddie Vedder was also a nice bonus and unexpected surprise for us!

Also hitting the road this week was our Jack Johnson team of Nicole and Johanna. They got their tour started in Indianapolis, braving rain with their hard core volunteer crew and getting over a hundred Jack fans registered to vote on their opening night.

Joining our touring teams on all of these dates are local Headcount volunteers – our Team Leaders, Regional Cordinators and local volunteers, all of whom are coming out in full force and really helping us get thousands of people registered this summer.

We’ve got lots of dates ahead of us – check back here often as ‘on the road updates’ will start to roll in, check out our photos here, and be sure to sign up to volunteer if you haven’t done so yet!

One often wonders whether politicians are paying attention to young or younger-minder voters. I resist the term “millennial” because the newly active voter demographic should include, to an important extent, voters born at least as early as 1980.

I often espouse the opinion that Obama is successful because he is the youngest, least overtly political candidate for president running for the Democratic Party nomination in 2008. But tonight, watching Obama’s speech in Iowa just prior to the official poll-closing in Oregan, I saw a glimpse of the new politics of which he promised to espouse. No, it was not in his pseudo victory speech. Instead, it could be heard in the outro music to his appearance tonight. One thing that I noticed early this season is that once Obama became the “front-runner” his outro-music for most appearances was Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” That is a great musical call, but certainly more aggressive a campaign move than a political statement.

Tonight, however, I saw something different. And I wonder if anyone noticed. The prologue to this event is that days ago President Bush delivered a speech before the Israeli Parliament during which he analogized diplomacy with Iran, Syria, etc., to appeasing Hitler’s Germany before or during World War II. Leave to one side the fact that (a) depicting a philosophy of diplomacy as akin to one of appeasement is nothing short of depicting an elephant’s eating habits as indicative of that of rabbit (i.e. not at all similar); and (b) the only congressmen in the Untied States during the 1930s or ’40s who favored appeasement were members of the GOP. Instead, focus on the important issue that President Bush is once again revitalizing the fear-mongering that has dominated politics since 2002. It is undeniable that the Karl Rove era, post-Cold War, politics is premised upon fear-mongering in the new foreign policy landscape. And it is quite clear that much of this theory is premised upon a parade of horribles in the middle east. President Bush escalated this to a new level in his speech overseas.

But today Obama responded. Not with rhetoric — although he did deliver a speech reminiscent of his triumphant speeches in Iowa, South Carolina, and other genuine “Yes We Can” moments — but with instant classic post-9/11 Bruce Springsteen. You most certainly will read about Obama’s resurgent tone of confidence and change. More importantly, however, his speech ended with Springsteen’s “The Rising.” The album, The Rising, is a Springsteen’s post-9/11 effort that is beautiful, sad, but most of all hopeful. (It has a sequence of songs: “Empty Sky”, “Worlds Apart”, and “Let’s Be Friends”.)

I’ll spare you the details of my experience working on a campaign in fall 2002, taking the day off for the first anniversary of 9/11, and spending the day driving around the Rocky Mountains listening to The Rising for the first time (before listening to some Wilco and Jerry). But since that very first listen, what has always stuck with me is how the album — and the title track — is overtly hopeful. The Rising expressly rejects the notion that we should live in — or vote based upon — fear. Instead, in the title track’s closing lyrics, the Boss opines that along with fear comes new opportunities for growth. In other words, new reasons to hope for an evolved politics. Admittedly, it is not Dylan in the ’60s. But it is a 21st Century nexus of politics and meaningful lyrics. Here is the closing lyrics to the tune that Obama employed tonight, just prior to “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” Please, tell me if I’m crazy to think that employing this song as Obama’s outro sends a message rejecting Rove’s politics of fear.

Sky of blackness and sorrow ( a dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness ( a dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear ( a dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow ( a dream of life)
Your burnin’ wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life ( a dream of life)

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

In 2001 when I got my license, I distinctly remember pulling my used white 1998 Dodge Neon into the gas station and pumping my tank full of 99 cent per gallon gas for a grand total of 11 dollars. When I was a senior in high school, and I wanted to skip class, I remember having 25 bucks which would get me from Sussex County, Delaware to Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia with enough money left over for a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, lunch, AND a pack of cigarettes!

When I turned 16 and got my license, my Mom was overjoyed because I LOVED to drive. I mean, I LOVED it. I began taking over the responsibility of grocery shopping. I would get a list of items, about $100 cash, and I had to shop for our family of three and make it last for one week. I was pretty good at it–getting crafty and using my calculator (which has stuck with me to this day) and my little brother loved it because I could usually budget to get him some zebra cakes and myself some perogies.

Today, it is 2008. I am almost 23 years old. My car is a low emissions vechile which gets 25 mpg, and it costs me $45 to fill my tank with gas. I live with my partner and when the two of us go shopping we spend at least $100 per week–and I don't always get perogies. A year or two ago we got those reusable bags, which we use every week. We own 6 of them; yesterday we only able to fill 4 1/2 of them with food on our budget.

Now, don't get me wrong. We are very grateful for our lives. We love our lives, to be exact. But money IS getting tighter and tighter. Every day the gas prices are going up. (Yesterday they were $3.67; today it's $3.71). Milk is $3.59 for a half gallon. Bread is at least $2.50, but if you want something healthy, be prepared to pay more. The number of people eating at soup kitchens has almost doubled in the last year. Is anyone getting the picture????

Food is becoming a problem… people are starving. Our responsibility as Americans is to let our government know when they are letting us down in whatever way they will listen. Voting is important and it is the best way to effectively erradicate corruption from office. But I really believe–heart and soul–that rioting and marching are another responsibility that we have to tell our government when something is OUTRAGEOUS and WE WILL NOT STAND FOR IT. Take a cue from Al Sharpton–who was arrested in the marches he led on behalf of Sean Bell. Where has the heart of America gone? Where is our backbone?

Are we so disconnected that we are willing to suffer in silence rather than to band together and stand for something?

Ben Smith at the Politico is now reporting what Matt Stoller blogged as rumor earlier this week: that the Obama campaign is telling progressive donors to withhold funds from “outside” 527 organizations. At this point it’s inclear whether this means all 527 organizations or all just the media organizations that might run negative campaigns in the fall.

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is steering the candidate’s wealthy supporters away from independent Democratic groups, calling into question what had been expected to be the groups’ central role in this year’s Democratic offensive against Senator John McCain.

Obama’s national finance chairwoman, Chicago hotel mogul Penny Pritzker, told supporters at a national finance committee meeting in Indianapolis May 2, and in other conversations, not to give money to the groups, people familiar with her comments said.

From the perspective of the Obama campaign, this makes sense. It reinforces their message of rejecting the partisanship of the past and don’t need anyone muddying their message with negative ads. They have a large enough volunteer base geographically dispersed enough to run their own 50-state field campaign (which they already launched this last weekend).

That’s a short-sighted view, however. The Obama campaign isn’t the end-all, be-all of progressive, or even Democratic, politics. He may well have the money and volunteers to pull this off all by himself this year, but will he do the same next year, while he’s busy pushing policy and his name isn’t on a single ballot? Will he lead the media and field campaigns during the 2010 midterms? What happens when Obama is no longer on the ballot? Or if Obama should become an unpopular president and can no longer muster the same forces as we’re seeing now?

One of these things will eventually come pass, and when they do, we will need those “outside” organizations to step up and fill the gaps as they have these last years.

In the realm of youth organizing, there was nothing happening outside of non-partisan voter registration prior to 2003. That was rectified by the creation of numerous 527 and 501c4 organizations during the last election cycle. Presumably these, too, would be defunded if the Obama campaign has its way.

Not all campaigns, will be as successful with youth as Sen. Obama. The state parties are still quite bad at targeting young voters. We will have a hard time maximizing youth turnout without those organizations, and I worry that if these new institutions have funds withheld this year, they will wither on the vine and in a few short years we will be back where we started pre-2003.

Some might argue that Obama is posturing. That this is just a pose to maintain his post-partisan image. That all depends on how serious the donors take him and what they decide to do with their money this cycle. If donors ignore Obama’s statements and give anyway, then no-harm no-foul. The article makes clear, however, that some donors are taking him seriously:

The donors have been considering entreaties from Progressive Media USA, run by conservative-journalist turned liberal media critic David Brock; from former Clinton aide John Podesta’s Fund for America; and from America Votes, a group backed by billionaire George Soros that focuses on voter mobilization, among other efforts.

But in recent days, major donors have begun to conclude that Obama is serious in trying to cut off funds to the outside groups.

“It’s given donors pause,” said one prominent Democratic donor of Pritzker’s words.

Youth organizing is supported by so few donors. Indeed, the big struggle now is to find mid-level donors to help make our new infrastructure more sustainable and less dependent on the whims of one or two funders. If even a few of these funders heed the Obama campaign’s words, it could have drastic effects on the sustainability of our nascent youth movement.

I hope that doesn’t happen.

So, for those of you out there who aren't big gamers, I feel your pain! I am not a big gamer. But my partner is, and he is always reading up on the latest and greatest games, and finding out cool little tid-bits about the gaming world. Every now and then, there is something he tells me about that catches my attention, and is actually pretty cool.

Nintendo Wii is truly a cool gaming system. I mean, you can break a sweat without leaving your living room, and for me, that is news-worthy! I have to admit, I am  impressed with the system and all of it's perks. (Like being able to hook it up to a broadband connection and play with anyone around the world–pretty groovy.)  In today's world, it seems technology is boundless. A couple of days ago, in the dorkiest magazine for gamers, I came across a pretty cool feature of the Nintendo Wii that I had been unaware of: Voting!!!!!

Yes, that's right HeadCounters–it's everywhere! So here's how it works; You have to be hooked up to the internet and there is a section you can access where people all over the US are voting. They are voting for things like, "do you prefer pie or cake" (people actually prefer cake by more than 20%!!!!) And the system gives you the results, and then breaks it down my region as to who prefers what. (Let it be known that people on the East Coast and Deep South prefer to eat pie, and those in the Midwest and West coasts, let them east cake!) Now, while pie and cake may not seem the most relevent issues, (unless it's your birthday) I am always impressed when I see these types of things. It's kind of a funny thing because we seem a culture obsessed with voting. Don't believe me? Just go on your favorite news website. I'll bet you that they have a daily vote….like "Should Hillary drop out of the race?" (That was on www.time.com yesterday.) So, being as such, why don't so many go out and vote in the "biggest vote" our country has? Furthermore, if Nintendo Wii can manage to have an effective vote casting arena…why can't the government???