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| April 22, 2005
The next generation The future belongs to them and these young people are determined to take charge of their property BY JILL KRAMER
Roni Krouzman is counting on Generation Yes to succeed. At 27, he’s young enough to connect with them, but old enough to have worked with a wearier generation. “I’m sick of sitting in community activist meetings where everybody is upset and bitter and sad and hopeless. It’s not fun and it doesn’t get us anywhere,” he says. “Students aren’t like that. They’re positive. They bring with them an idealism and a desire to do things that I also have. Besides, young people have always been leaders of movements for social change.” For those reasons, Krouzman founded Next Generation two-and-a-half years ago. Operating out of the two-bedroom San Rafael apartment he shares with a roommate, Krouzman trains and mobilizes young people to work for peace and a sustainable planet. He goes into high schools and middle schools and holds classroom discussions on the war in Iraq, civil liberties and environmental activism. He’s running a two-week educational summer camp on organic farming and green building. He organizes rallies and events. And he facilitates a “student action team”—a group of 10 high schoolers who meet every week to work on ways to change the world. The day I stop by, team members are making plans for an Earth Day celebration Next Generation is producing along with three other youth-oriented organizations: Marin Conservation Corps, the Marin Food Systems Project and Safe Routes to Schools. The theme of the all-day event, to be held Sunday, April 24 at College of Marin, is “Sustainable Solutions for the Next Generation.” It’s being orchestrated, for the most part, by Generation Yes—people 30 and under—and it’s geared to appeal to the short-attention-span crowd. Program segments will be fast-paced, with music, dancing, puppetry and other entertainment interspersed with speakers, who will be kept brief and snappy. Krouzman and his one paid staffer, 24-year-old Danielle LaVigna, sit around his dining room table with five rosy-cheeked students scarfing down relatively wholesome and politically correct snacks: orange segments, chips and Newman’s cookies. They’re there to divvy up responsibilities for a workshop they’ll conduct at the Earth Day event on “How to Green Your School”—bringing energy efficiency, recycling and organic food into the school system. But first, they review the event they held the previous weekend at Marin Academy. “We had an amazing Student Art and Activism Festival!” crows LaVigna to cheers and whoops all around. “And we want to do an evaluation,” she continues. “So what was awesome? What kicked butt? And what do we want do different next time?” This is not your father’s activist meeting. Krouzman has been agitating since his own grade school years. He started his first underground newspaper in fifth grade. He grew up in suburban New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. His parents, both politically liberal, emigrated from Israel a few years before his birth. His father was a clothing importer, his mother worked for El Al Airlines. He remembers, at age 7, seeing their dismay at the re-election of Ronald Reagan. By high school, Krouzman was organizing his classmates to demand a student bill of rights and more control of curricula. At Boston University, he uncovered a weapons-development plan to be funded by the Navy and printed his findings in the newspaper he published there. In the process, he learned an important lesson for his future activism: simply providing the information isn’t enough. “Information doesn’t lead to change,” he says. “It’s organizing that leads to change.” He also learned the power of building coalitions. Applying that lesson, he scored a major victory with Boston Mobilization, the peace and justice organization he headed just after he graduated. The issue was the preservation of Fenway Park, Boston’s beloved old baseball stadium. The owners wanted millions of dollars plus 10 acres of private land to build a bigger ballpark. Krouzman brought student activists together with baseball fans, environmentalists and the neighborhood community development corporation to protest the plan. The coalition won. Fenway Park still stands. • • • • LAST MONTH, NEXT Generation organized a surprisingly broad coalition in San Rafael to protest the diversion of local funding to the war in Iraq. While some $50 million in taxes from local residents has been funneled toward the war, 30 city jobs have been eliminated. As federal funding for state and local projects dries up, a strapped state government provides no relief to cities. So March 4, Krouzman’s kids teamed with activists from the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition and marched to a series of downtown public agencies reeling from the cuts, from the library to City Hall, proclaiming “Fund Our Community, Not War.” The procession stopped at each agency to hear testimony from officials: the city manager, the public works director, the fire chief, the police chief. “We were all flabbergasted sitting there as the police chief, in uniform with his firearm, was testifying at a forum that we’d organized!” says Krouzman. It was a heady moment for Eva Orbuch, the 15-year-old Marin Academy student who came up with the idea for the rally. She’d only gotten involved in political activism last fall, during the runup to the election. She joined the Peace and Justice Coalition at Marin Academy, then started attending Next Generation meetings after hearing Krouzman speak at the school. “I got inspired when I heard about grass-roots actions taking place, like kids my age going to Nevada and other swing states to register voters,” she says. “That got me thinking about what I could do. And I thought it would draw people in if they could see how their townis being diminished by the war. There are lots of national efforts to stop the war, but I’m really into local community.” More than 100 people turned out that Friday afternoon. Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-6th District) spoke to the crowd, as did City Councilman Cyr Miller. “Usually when you go to a rally, it’s all the same crowd, the same people from the Peace and Justice Coalition,” says Orbuch. “But this time we had all these official people from City Hall. I felt like we were being taken seriously. Before I got involved, I felt like I didn’t have the power to change anything. And a lot of kids feel that way. But I’m seeing that you do have some power, at least to impact your community.” Building that sense of empowerment in young people is exactly what Krouzman intends. Beyond that, he’d like to see Orbuch’s idea replicated in other communities. “If we can spread that around the country, then I think we can succeed. If we’re going to stop the war and defend the environment and build a country we can be proud of, it can’t be ‘us’ against ‘them.’ The ‘us’ has to be the majority.” Krouzman believes that majority already exists; it just has to be mobilized. “I don’t believe we’re just a bunch of wacky liberals. I believe we represent views of the majority of people in this nation. Most people would prefer to avoid war, they want increased protections for the environment, they want increased funding for poverty programs and for our schools. But often our politicians will trick people and some of the people who are with us morally end up voting against their interests.” Krouzman also thinks the conservative effort to starve local agencies of funding is alienating voters—a political mistake progressives should capitalize on. “If the extreme right wants to destroy American institutions, let’s use their energy to our advantage,” he says. “We can defend those institutions and also advance their mandates, to make them even more progressive. So if they want to cut money from the police departments and the schools, we can pass local sales taxes and fund these things and we can demand, say, that the schools run on solar power or that the police wear fair trade uniforms.” • • • • KROUZMAN OFTEN USES the issue of military funding in his classroom presentations—it’s a surefire way to provoke debate. He carries around a gigantic bar graph that he props up on the blackboard showing discretionary spending proposed by the Bush administration for 2006: the bar for military spending, at $572 billion, stretches clear across the wall, nine times longer than the next largest bar, representing health spending. While Krouzman’s political agenda is unabashedly progressive, he welcomes dissenting voices at his classroom presentations. Leading a discussion on the federal budget at a Branson School economics class recently, he called on students to analyze both costs and benefits in terms of security, democracy, economics, health and the environment. He found a way to agree with every student’s comments. “I really try to defend minority viewpoints because I think it’s important for young people to have the self-esteem and the security to speak out,” he says. “Also, I believe that if you see all sides you can better refine your argument. And the third reason is that if you can understand opposing arguments, you’re more likely to be able to build an alliance with the people who make them.” Krouzman is slim and dark with blue eyes and a sweet gap-toothed smile. Already thinning on top, he keeps his hair short. His manner is a mix of East Coast rapid-fire speech and West Coast low-key mellowness. As an administrator, he’s also an amalgam: part visionary and part fund-raiser. “A lot of people on the left have taboos about money,” he says. “But if we’re going to succeed against corporations that literally have hundreds of billions of dollars, we need to get as many resources as we can, so we can have offices and staff and we can travel and produce materials.” When Krouzman was a kid, he modeled himself after the Michael J. Fox character in the TV show Family Ties. “He was conservative, but at the time I saw him just as the entrepreneur, the businessman, and when I was young I was a big-time entrepreneur. We had all sorts of money-making schemes when we were little, me and my friends and my sister. We had carnivals in our backyard. And I would go door to door selling baseball cards. I was a liberal, but I had faith in the capitalist system and the market economy.” He still does. “Enterprise is great. The problem is greed and unaccountable power. But you can have enterprise that is socially responsible and socially accountable. I see those things coming together now in the green economy movement, where we can really start to build the kind of economy that we want.” Perhaps the most important aspect of the green economy is the push for sustainable energy—a goal the left shares with some of the nation’s leading boosters of the Iraq war. Bud McFarlane (National Security Advisor to President Reagan and key player in the Iran-Contra scandal), Frank Gaffney (assistant secretary of defense under Reagan), C. Boyden Gray (White House counsel to the first President Bush) and James Woolsey (CIA director under President Clinton) were among the signatories to a letter recently sent to the president stating that the development of clean energy alternatives is “essential” to national security. While these hawks warn that our dependence on foreign oil makes us vulnerable to terrorists, the left sees it as the chief motive for the war with Iraq. “The reason we started to work on sustainability is that our students wanted to get at the root causes of war,” says Krouzman. “If we can reduce our consumption of oil domestically, not only is that better for the environment, it also reduces the incentive for war.” That’s one of many reasons Melanie Grubman doesn’t own a car. The 26-year-old education coordinator for Marin Safe Routes to Schools travels all around the county by bicycle. “Obviously, if you’re less dependent on oil by not driving as much, you’re automatically living in a lifestyle that speaks up against the war,” she says. But the car-free lifestyle is much more than a statement against the war for Grubman, who also serves on Next Generation’s board of directors. “It’s a way of healing a lot of the wounds we have in our culture of feeling isolated,” she says. “Car culture separates us from the Earth, separates us from the people driving next to us. When you’re walking and biking you can stop in at stores, you can say hello to people, you can feel the weather, you’re staying healthy. That’s the world that I want to live in.” Grubman’s job takes her to 40 elementary and middle schools, from Novato to Sausalito, where she teaches kids bicycle and pedestrian safety. With the older students, she promotes “transportation activism”—helping them start clubs and take on projects that make it easier for kids to walk and bike to school. At Mill Valley Middle School, they shut down the drop-off zone for cars in front of the school because it was a safety hazard to walkers and bikers. At Redwood High School, students are lobbying the town to install a roundabout to slow car traffic in front of the school. Students at other schools are pressing administrators to put in more secure bike racks. Like Krouzman, Grubman believes that it’s important to teach kids to take power into their own hands. “Kids have so many people telling them what’s bad. They know there’s a war and they know about global warming, but there aren’t enough solutions or answers. So it’s, ‘Oh, great, everything sucks!’ So in my presentations, I want to make them feel passionate about making changes in their lives. We all have responsibility for creating the world that we want to live in.” Grubman is looking forward to the Earth Day event to spread her message to a wider audience. If nothing else, the planning process has strengthened the ties between the various organizations involved. Grubman, who’s responsible for booking the speakers, the entertainers and the workshops, has been working closely with Next Generation, Marin Conservation Corps and the Marin Food Systems Project to pull the event together. “In the long run,” she says, “all our messages are the same.” Grubman and Krouzman are hoping that event goers will learn specific actions they can take that will make a difference—in their own lives and in the world. “I have faith in this movement,” says Krouzman. “I’m a part of it not because I know it will succeed but because I have faith that it will succeed, because I have hope that it will succeed, and because I have love for the Earth and for people. In an age of nuclear weapons and an age where we can alter the climate, we need to win. What gives me hope is that, down at their core, everybody wants peace, everybody wants to have nature around them. In our hearts, that’s what all of us want.” PHOTO OF RONI KROUZMAN BY RORY MCNAMARA |
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MARIN EARTH DAY • ENTERTAINMENT • SPEAKERS • WORKSHOPS For more information log on to www.MarinEarthDay.org |
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Call them Generation Yes. They’re the fresh-faced go-getters too young to know defeat. Armed with energy and optimism, they’re determined to save the Earth. They promote clean energy, green building and peace. They ride bicycles, eat organic food and wear fair trade clothing. And they believe that, some day, everyone else will, too. |
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