What is Future 5000?
Future 5000 is a tool to support the growth of a powerful and connected progressive youth movement. It's a dynamic directory of youth organizations working for justice across all 50 states. All of the 700+ organizations listed on Future5000.com have their own profile that describes their work in one of four Sectors of Youth Organizing: campus, community, civic engagement, and cultural. This search-able directory and networking site will help us visualize and organize our movement, people, activities, and resources across and within diverse kinds of youth organizing.
Built from the ground up by dedicated youth organizers, Future 5000's potential is limitless. Just as the movement is sustained by its people, this site is sustained by you, your organization, your work, and a shared passion for connection and change. In essence, Future 5000 is more than just a directory...it's a forum for ideas, a platform for shared visions, a paramount possibility for our networks to grow. Here are a few examples of Future 5000 capabilities:
- You can also share strategies, tools, stories, and even media galleries in one central place.
- You can search for groups with similar missions (across the street or across the country) and begin/continue to forge powerful relationships.
-You'll also be able to post campaigns, create coalitions, have organizational allies, and share resources (like office equipment or curricula) with other organizations.
- Start an online campaign and build alliances with a the click of a mouse and a few taps of your keyboard.
In its simplest form, Future 5000 is powerful--because you are. Future 5000 will evolve to meet the needs of organizers, not just as an online directory, but truly as an instrumental vehicle engineered to maximize resource and information sharing between youth organizations.
Why is Future 5000 vital?
The need for a resource like Future 5000 has resounded through the youth movement as we know it - the gnawing sound of questions and seemingly endless frustrations surrounding how we, as organizers, can better pool resources, communicate, and mobilize across the divides within youth organizing. In our research and development stage for Future 5000, we talked with hundreds of youth organizers around the country, we heard over and over again about how organizers want to connect organizational work around their causes and communities and make a larger impact. We've seen firsthand, and continue to see that youth are facing the same issues and challenges across the country - education, jobs, prison/military industrial complex, environmental justice, police brutality, gentrification, etc. - We've felt the staggering affects of having little time to reach out and learn from one another about successful strategies and tactics. We understand the lack of opportunities and space afforded to building alliances in this pivotal movement. Therefore, we've designed Future 5000 to be an all-inclusive and reliable tool for youth organizers and our allies to have easy access to each other, our resources, and current information about our collective national efforts towards justice.
Who are we?
The Future 5000 team is passionately committed to creating an accurate, respectful, responsible, efficient, intentional, easily-understood, and well-run organizing tool. Future 5000 is not only reflective of the communities that we represent, but ultimately belongs to the communities that we are working to serve.. Each individual of the team comes from a background of working for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We are proud to be part of collaborative work and committed to long-term alliance building. We recognize that history will forget our names, but this tool could change the way our children's children experience peace, freedom and justice in this world.
Our History
In 2002 a group of young organizers from around the country published a book called Future 500, highlighting some of the most dynamic youth organizations in the country. Now, six years later, an alliance of 10 youth organizations are dedicating staff and resources to creating the interactive, online upgrade to the original book. Members of the Generational Alliance, particularly the League of Young Voters, Movement Strategy Center, and Young People For, are collaborating to bring together youth organizations among four distinct sectors of organizing: campus, community, civic engagement, and cultural. The youth field has been fractured among these fields, and the formation of the Generational Alliance around Future 5000 was a first step towards building a cohesive network and leadership development pipeline.