Millennials Changing America is a conversational representation of the thoughts, opinions, outlooks and lifestyles of socially and civically engaged Millennials today.
The project is a synthesis of two projects:
- Mike Hais and Morley Winograd's ongoing documentation of how the Millennial Generation, and its culture, is changing the United States.
- Alex Steed's Millennials Changing America 2008 road-based anecdotal research tour which, inspired in large part by Hais' and Winograds' work, took Steed to over 30 cities and introduced him to hundreds of ordinary Millennials, change-makers, leaders and activists.
Hais, Winograd and Steed have come together in this web incarnation of Millennials Changing America in order to continue offering an ear to Millennial voices and shining a spotlight on the generation's experience and insight.
Michael D. Hais served for a decade as Vice President, Entertainment Research and for more than 22 years overall at Frank N. Magid Associates where he conducted audience research for hundreds of television stations, cable channels, and program producers in nearly all 50 states and more than a dozen foreign countries.Prior to joining Magid in 1983, Hais was a political pollster for Democrats in Michigan and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Detroit. He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, all in political science.
Morley Winograd served as senior policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore and director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) from December 1, 1997 until January 20, 2001. He was the executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM) at USC’s Marshall School of Business from July 2001 through June 2009. Winograd also co-authored (with Dudley Buffa) Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age (Holt, 1996). Winograd’s lectures on the topic of technology's reshaping of America have won wide praise in forums as diverse as the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Los Angeles' Town Hall, Harvard's JFK School of Government, and Bologna University's John Hopkins School of International Affairs.
Alex Steed is a communication consultant for nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups, and he specializes in community management and constituency activation. In mid-2008, he organized, fundraised for an executed Millennials Changing America, a cross-country research tour that took him to 30 different cities in exploration for how, exactly, Millennials leverage their political power by way of using Internet technologies. He sits on the Steering Committee of the Maine League of Young Voters. Steed is also an educator, and will be teaching a class about the history and methodologies of Internet-based activism at the University of Maine Honors Program in January of 2010. He is a volunteer staff member for Maine Youth Leadership, a leadership seminar made available for one high school sophomore from every high school in Maine. At present, he is organizing several extra-curricular media literacy classes, also for high school sophomores.