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If your organization is like most nonprofits, you've been working on diversity for a long time. You've tried to make sure that your staff, your board and your non-governing volunteers look like your community. For some nonprofits this has been a pretty easy accommodation to better practice, while some are still struggling. But diversity is good: It gives us a better range of perspectives, a richer set of ideas, and a closer connection to the community we are in business to serve.

So, here's the question: what about diversity by age? Fact: Most board members in the U.S., Canada and the UK are Boomers, but our generations served range from Greatest Generation to post Gen@. Are your board, your management team, your non-governing volunteers representative of your community in terms of age? If not, why not? And, to be fair, you may be asking, who cares? It's just age, not ethnicity. What's the big deal?

The big deal is this: our different generations are really different cultures, so different that we see life at its most basic levels differently, we attack problems differently, we seek solutions differently, we manage differently, we look at work and the rest of our lives differently. And, as much as those of us who are Boomers hate to admit it, every day we're a smaller and smaller percentage of the workforce as more and more younger employees come on board. If we want to lead well, we have to understand what it takes to lead younger employees. If we want to attract donations, volunteers, board member from younger generations, we have to understand what motivates them and to do that we need their perspective; we have to embrace age diversify.

When I wrote Generations: The Challenge of A Lifetime for Your Nonprofit, I knew that different generations had their individuality, but since the book's publication, as I've been criss-crossing the country speaking about the topic, reading more, and discussing the implications with nonprofits from Alaska to Florida, I've come to the realization that this is a true cultural difference, and differences can become divides unless we bridge them.

Here are some key areas of difference of perspective from one generation to another:

Race and Ethnicity. During the US presidential election, the Gen@ voters (born after 1981) were characterized a number of times in the press as "post-racial". What does that mean? That they see race differently....by seeing it much, much less than Boomers do. Racial conflict and prejudice has not caused the pain and divisiveness for the young that it has for their parents and grandparents. It's not that they don't know history, the just didn't live it. In addition-they lived a different history: Remember this, if you went to public school in the US starting after 1969, you always went to school with people of different color--while your parents probably didn't. Mixed race dating and marriage, mixed-race clubs, sororities, etc. on campus, all of which were unusual if not unheard of 25 years ago are now ubiquitous---not even remarkable.

Work-Life Balance. The 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to inter-generational conflict, work life balance is a clear dividing line between the older generations (Boomers and Silent) and the younger (GenX and Gen@). For those of us who are older, our motto is "Live to Work!", and for the younger? "Work to Live!". Think about the difference in outlook summarized in those six words. No wonder we fuss at each other so much.

Technology. Well, duh. Everyone knows this, but we rarely think about how deep this difference is. Gen@ members have never known a world without personal technology (PC's, laptops, cell phones, the internet); it's in their DNA. Boomers, we're still regularly amazed by much of what is going on around us, and, whether we admit it or not, often struggle to keep up to the point that we don't see some, perhaps most, of the opportunities that tech can bring to our mission. So? So this: It is my strong belief that the future of philanthropy is the successful merger of mission and technology. If we don't have people on our management team and on our board who viscerally, totally get technology, we're doomed to not do as much mission as we could if we did have their perspective and insights.

Decision Making. Boomers, think back to third grade and an arithmetic test. What did your teacher tell you? "Cover your work!" How have our children learned to solve problems? In groups. Whether it's a middle school project or a grad school exam, we've reconstructed the education system to have our children sic lots of different ideas, perspectives and talents (one could call this diversity) on a problem. But when young people graduate and come to our organizations, we tell them to sit down, do their job and don't talk until they are called on. After 12, or 16 or 18 years of school that taught them the exact opposite, this is, to say the least, disorienting, and the cause of much, much frustration.

Just think about those four differences a bit. Whether you are 25 or 75, or any age in between, you've seen these differences in culture play out, sometimes in an ugly fashion, sometimes humorously.

We all know that understanding a language does not make us culturally competent. So, if we have the opportunity to serve members of a Honduran immigrant community, just speaking Spanish is not enough--we need to learn more about the culture and often will engage a Honduran community member to help us understand more. That way we can serve them better.

Same thing with generations. Just learning how 2 rd a txt msg dz nt make u culturally proficient--you need to have someone from that generation (and all others) to give you the perspectives, the diversity you need to continue to do the best mission possible.

February, 2009 -by Peter C. Brinckerhoff