If you’re trying to do good, here’s why you should care about government.
On June 25, 2019, Sen. Eric Lesser spoke with the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network, an organization that unites and strengthens the Massachusetts nonprofit sector through advocacy, public awareness, and capacity-building. These are his remarks, as prepared for delivery.
Our generation — the Millennial Generation — is seeing a troubling divergence between not-for-profit work and political work.
Our generation is more engaged, more interested in changing the world than any previous generation. But our young people don’t view government as the way to do it, they view nonprofits as the way to do it.
Interest in community work, in volunteering, has skyrocketed while interest in politics and voting continues to trend downwards.
It’s a big challenge because separating these two is dangerous.
A lifetime of volunteer work can be undone with the stroke of a pen on Beacon Hill or Capitol Hill.
Separating the nonprofit world from the political world is a false dichotomy. The two are intertwined.
How can you separate your work for a food pantry from raising the minimum wage, or rising inequality, or agriculture policy?
We need the service corps, the nonprofit community, to be actively engaged in these political questions that directly affect the outcomes of your work.
Government’s Role
On the flip side, if you’re only focused on the politics or the government side, you increasingly become detached from what the stakes are, from what’s going on, on the ground.
That’s why I left Washington, after working in the Obama White House — because the rising cost of healthcare, or prescription drugs, or housing became a game show between two warring teams.
What we need to do is build up leaders and build up efforts that purposefully partner the work of on-the-ground nonprofit organizations and the broader-level work of policy and systemic change.
We have to be able to move between these two worlds more effortlessly. Because government offers solutions to many of the challenges that are creating needs in your own work.
A lot of people in our generation want to work in the nonprofit world, they want to work in community-oriented, service-oriented fields, but they can’t. Because they can’t afford to.
My mom, a lifelong social worker, went to City College in New York for a few hundred dollars a semester. The same person, with the same credentials, now — unless they have a lot of private resources — is going to be footing a student loan bill of $500 or more a month for decades.
Then they have to immediately start saving for their kids’ college while they’re still paying their own school debt.
Meanwhile, healthcare takes a bigger and bigger chunk out of the paycheck every year. And few have pensions to rely on for retirement.
The stakes are much higher than they were a generation ago.
And this is unsustainable.
But government offers solutions — whether it’s policy to allow people to take college courses in high school, or forgiving student loans for those who choose to work at a food bank, or a halfway house, or an adult education center.
Government can offer solutions
The final thing I’ll say before taking questions is — and this is a pet peeve of mine — there was a 30-year project in American life and politics to demean government, to tie the hands of those protecting consumers from Wall Street’s greed, to lay off food inspectors and park rangers. Certain factions wanted to turn the government into the enemy.
There was a somewhat cynical argument made that it’s the role of the nonprofit sector to fill in the gaps, to solve these massive structural problems in society.
That’s just nonsense.
Anyone who’s engaged in these issues — who really wants to get at the heart of these systemic issues — knows that you could have a fabulously-run food pantry with endless resources, but if you never solve the unemployment problem in a community, you’re never going to solve the food insecurity problem.
And how do you bring jobs to a community? Building a road, building a railroad, building a school has something to do with that. And this is the role of government.
There are certain things only government can do and certain things only the nonprofit sector can do and they have to complement each other.
Together, let’s tackle the defining issue of our generation.
Are we going to look back and see, on the one hand, the destruction of our economy and the breakdown of society and on the other, limitless human potential that could have prevented all of that?
If someone had told my mom the day I was born that by the time I was my age, I could hold the totality of human knowledge in a device in my hand, she would have said that belongs in “The Jetsons” or “Star Trek.”
The potential for human change and potential is unrivaled in human history.
We have everything we need to make this world better, to deliver real change to people.
The question for our time is, has all this potential and this technology and this knowledge actually helped anyone? Has it led to a more fulfilling life, a better life? Has it led to a better quality of life for more people?
It’s an unanswered question, and I think it’s our generation’s responsibility to provide a positive answer to that question.
State Senator Eric P. Lesser is the Senate chairman of the Joint Committee on Economic Development & Emerging Technologies. As a millennial, he is one of the youngest people elected to the Massachusetts State Senate. He represents the First Hampden & Hampshire District in Western Massachusetts.
