School for Change-makers

Last Saturday, I had the privilege of being a "pitch coach" at dosomething.org's Social Action Boot Camp in New York City. I was one of 60 official "old persons" [people in business over 30] invited by the organization's CEO [and chief old person] Nancy Lublin, to help coach some of the 14- to 22-year-old participants on their pitches to start and sustain a cause. Their training for the day included how to write a not-for-profit business plan and how to build a successful Web site for less than $10, as well as how to brand and market their causes and start a social enterprise.

I and my fellow coaches, which included VH1 President Tom Calderone and Deutsch Bank Managing Director Steven Beck, didn't participate until the final hours; the young entrepreneurs practiced the funding pitches they'd created earlier in the day and then tried them out on us. It was our job to critique them. Each of the best three pitches were later awarded $1,000.

I consider myself a tough listener; as a journalist and a media executive, I'm pitched daily by nonprofits and social enterprises. But these kids? Most of them had me at hello, and not simply because of their idealism. Their fearless pragmatism and their clarity of purpose, process, and design distinguished them.

One pitch I heard was from Liz Hesterberg, a junior at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is working to create a nonprofit to raise awareness of child soldiers and the war in Uganda, as well as raise money for a youth center to be built there. Another pitch came from Rebecca Kantar, a senior at Newton North High School in Massachusetts and a founding member of Minga, a teen-run, not-for-profit group working to ease the global child sex trade by educating teens worldwide.

But the real star of the day was Nancy Lublin, Do Something's CEO and lead entrepreneur--the person spearheading these boot camps. "Young people possess the energy, creativity and motivation to rock the world," Lublin told me and the other coaches she assembled last Saturday. "We're here to help them do it."

I first met Lublin in 2006, at a cover shoot for a Contribute Magazine lead story I had assigned as Contribute's Editor-in-Chief that was called "21 Under 40" - profiling 21 young social activists [including Lublin] to watch. Lublin's own story was and remains especially inspiring: Her first activist campaign, she says, was liberating the purple crayons in pre-school after one loud boy had declared them "not allowed for girls." Then, one February more than a decade ago -- when Lublin was a law student at NYU -- she remembers returning to her then-West Village apartment, only to find a $5,000 check waiting for her in her mailbox, sent to her from the estate of her great-grandfather, who had died years earlier. But Lublin, then 23, didn't spend it on herself. Instead, she used it to team up with three nuns in the Bronx to start Dress for Success, the now world-known nonprofit that collects new and gently used business suits to give to women trying to transition from welfare to work, women who often don't have suitable outfits for job interviews.

Initially, Lublin ran the organization out of her tiny student apartment while continuing to attend law school, all the while loudly recruiting donations from her friends and family. "I was a fundamentalist not-for-profit person," she told Contribute reporter Jesse Ellison. "I was evangelical." But when her place became overrun with donated clothes -- to the point where there was jewelry in the vegetable crisper and suits hanging from her shower rod -- Lublin knew she was really on to something. Today, Dress for Success is an international operation with 75 affiliates -- and Do Something, a nonprofit Lublin was recruited to lead in 2003, has gone from being an "old-school" nonprofit on the brink of financial collapse to becoming one of the most popular and Internet-savvy nonprofits for youth in this country.

And Lublin is just getting started. By 2011, she says, her goal is that at least 2 million kids are taking action and reporting back to Do Something about their work. Judging by her past track record, Lublin will certainly make that goal. It's all about walking the talk, she says, and teaching others how to do the same.

True to form, at the end of the day Saturday--just before the pitch session began--Lublin asked the group to recite with her Do Something's rallying cry, which goes as follows:

I am not a rock star. I am not Bill Gates.

I've never sold an Internet company.

But I can rock change.

And I can do something before I go to bed tonight.

So look out world!

I am starting now.

They're on their way.

For more information on Lublin and Do Something, go to www.dosomething.org.