This is the start of it if you can't read it on there
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: September 11, 2005
LYNN GROSSMAN, a writer in Manhattan who is married to the actor Bob Balaban, comes from a long line of social activists. Her mother joined the civil rights movement, and she herself marched in protest of the Vietnam War. But she said that things had changed by the time her eldest daughter, Mariah, now 27, came of age.
Steve Ruark for The New York Times
PROVIDING SHELTER Michael Swirnow, left, and Greg Becker have been working with Habitat for Humanity to buy a house for a needy family in Baltimore.
For many in Mariah's generation, community service was little more than a requirement that private schools imposed for graduation. Some took brief working vacations in places like Costa Rica, or the Caribbean island of Dominica, where they helped build roads and houses. "These kids had never seen a hammer before," Ms. Grossman said with a laugh. "I don't know what they did aside from get suntans."
Now, she said, "things are completely different."
As an eighth grader, her youngest daughter, Hazel, transformed a basement storage room in a Brooklyn homeless shelter into a library stocked with 5,000 volumes. At 13, she mobilized her fellow students to paint walls, hire librarians and design a functioning library-card system linked to a computer database. "We were floored," Ms. Grossman said. "And it's not just Hazel. A lot of kids out there are like this. They are like C.E.O.'s of community service."
Hazel Balaban, now a freshman at Connecticut College in New London, spent her first days on campus last week trying to organize a bake sale for victims of Hurricane Katrina. "It's almost expected," she said. "With the Internet and 24-hour TV, you just see all these problems. They're everywhere."
Hazel is at the leading edge of a generation whose sense of community involvement was born four years ago on Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks spurred an unprecedented outpouring of donations and volunteerism from Americans. Since then teenagers have witnessed the deadly Florida hurricane season of 2004, the more than 150,000 killed by the tsunami in Asia last December, and now Katrina. Encouraged by an increasing number of high schools with community service requirements and further motivated by college admissions offices looking for reasons to choose one honor student over another, teenagers are embracing social activism with the zeal of missionaries and the executive skills of seasoned philanthropists. Not only are more students participating, educators say, the scale of ambition seems to be continually increasing.
"We've seen a shift in the zeitgeist away from what you would call 'community service' and more into social action," said Tom Krattenmaker, a spokesman for Swarthmore College near Philadelphia. "It's not just about working in a soup kitchen," he said, but about "creating new programs, shooting higher."
GREGORY PYKE, the senior associate dean of admission at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., said that one recent applicant had started a Web-based initiative to collect eyeglasses - thousands of pairs - to be passed along to the needy in underprivileged countries. Another created a large-scale program to collect and refurbish discarded computers before passing them along to the poor. "The number of discussions where a dean is pulling us aside and saying, 'You have to hear about what this kid has done' has also gone up," he said.
While cynics - and not a few colleges - may question whether the young people initiating such grand projects are looking to impress admissions officers, Mr. Pyke said he thought that most of the motivation was altruistic. "These are kids who are aware of many ways in which world is a pretty lousy place," he said. "They want to exercise more authority in the world than adults give them credit for."
Educators, sociologists and parents explain the outpouring of youthful philanthropy by noting that this generation has been bombarded not only by bad news, all of which seems to demand an immediate response, but by calls to action from political leaders and celebrities. Disaster relief, unlike opposition to the Vietnam War, which stirred many in their parents' generation, is uncontroversial and encourages wide-scale participation. And once roused, young people have greater tools at their disposal, particularly the Internet, to expand projects.