Despite the fact that millennials have a reputation for being narcissistic and apathetic, four Harvard Business School students are confident that the opposite is true — and they cite the massive number of individuals who participated in Occupy Boston protests, Tea Party rallies and the #blacklivesmatter movement as proof. They believe that young people do care, and that many — from all political persuasions — are taking action in a variety of ways. All that's holding them back is either deficient insight into what’s going on in the world, or the lack of a platform to express their opinions. That’s why this group of students decided to start OpedSpace, a news site for Generation Y that covers a range of complex topics, from climate change and foreign policy to immigration. The goal? To build "a big community of tomorrow's leaders" by enabling millennials all over the world to share their diverse perspectives on the world's most pressing problems. After all, who could possibly relay current events in a more digestible way to Gen Yers than people their own age?
The students behind OpedSpace recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for their site — and 11 days in, it’s already 72 percent funded, having raising $10,824 from 125 people. And the team members' strong yet varied backgrounds in politics and journalism have certainly helped them get things off the ground. Editor-in-chief Tewfik Cassis previously worked for McKinsey and Facebook, and managed the MIT International Review; CEO Fred Spring worked for the UK Government and BCG and used to be the managing editor of Oxford University’s newspaper; and chief creative officer Alex Schuster had worked at The Huffington Post where she helped launch HuffPost Live. Andrew Cedar, their board advisor, was most recently the former White House senior director for global engagement.
The site went live last September, and by November had amassed about 45 contributors across 15 different countries. OpedSpace also began syndicating content with other news organizations and portals to spread the word, including the Huffington Post and Harvard International Review. There are now at least 96 contributors for Oped Space, and readers in over 130 countries.
And the team is looking to ramp things up even further.
The $15,000 OpedSpace aims to raise will be used to overhaul the website and boost video efforts. The site has been slowly diversifying the kind of content, incorporating more rich media, and their goal is to pursue this further with a video series featuring one contributor. Next month, they’ll run their first installment of the “Time Out With Tara” series, in which they’ll interview movers and shakers in the active community around the world. The startup also plans to develop concerted campaigns about the issues that matter to Gen Y, like political dysfunction and diminished job opportunities.
“Whether it is the second year analyst on Wall Street that still finds time to volunteer at an education NGO, or the Tunisian Civil Rights activist who has devoted her entire life to improving job opportunities to her compatriots you see young people all around the world actively contributing to their communities,” wrote the team on their Indiegogo page. “The sad part is that their stories are largely ignored and unheard…We want to change that.”
A $10 contribution to the campaign, which has 35 days left to go, gets you onto a weekly email list highlighting the best current content on OpedSpace, while $30 grants you a print from one of the site’s photo essays. If you donate $75, you’ll get an OpedSpace t-shirt (this will show your friends that you are an informed consumer of quality news), and $250 gets you a ticket to our OpedSpace Contributor Conference, where you can interact with the community producing the content.
All images via OpedSpace.
