If you’re between the ages of 18-30, opportunity knocks. The non-profit Palomar5 initiative is building an international network of creative people ready to design and engineer the working world of tomorrow. Palomar5 seeks to break with prevailing paradigms and create new ways for business to operate that will engage and satisfy the needs of the digital generation. This fall, 30 Digital Natives from around the globe will come together in Berlin (air, food and lodging will be paid) for a six-week innovation camp to collaborate on real-world solutions while living and working together in an extraordinary interdisciplinary environment.

The camps participants and output will be introduced to economic and political leaders during a post-camp summit. Applications are still being accepted until 8/30. Palomar5s main sponsor is Deutsche Telekom AG. For more info and application: http://palomar5.org

From Ode Magazine

Bestselling author Dave Eggers believes helping young people learn to express themselves can make all the difference in the world.

Marco Visscher | June/July 2009 issue

Dave Eggers

Photo: McSweeney’s

Halfway through our interview, Dave Eggers jumps up from the sofa, flips open his laptop, which is buried under a pile of magazines and newspapers, and retrieves an email from Valentino Achak Deng, the Sudanese refugee whose harrowing experiences during his country’s civil war and bizarre entry into the U.S. were chronicled by Eggers in What Is the What. The proceeds from that book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, go to Deng’s foundation , which is helping reconstruct Sudan. The email contains photos showing what has been done so far with the money: pictures of a recently opened school building in Marial Bai, Deng’s native village. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Eggers says.

Call it “trickle-down eggersnomics”—ever since his immensely successful 2000 debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has used his royalties to help others. He devoted some of that money to 826 Valencia, which helps children in poor neighborhoods of San Francisco with their writing skills and homework. Meanwhile, he runs McSweeney’s, a publishing house that offers a platform for unknown writers and brings out a series of books in which those on the margins of society—such as prisoners and undocumented immigrants—get the chance to tell their stories. Eggers is using his Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Prize—a $100,000 award given by the TED arts and ideas conference that grants the recipient “one wish to change the world”—to inspire people to put time and energy into helping inner city kids in public schools. “You do what you can,” Eggers says.