By Naftali Edjelman, ROI Micro Grant recipient is the Co-Founder of Yiddish Farm and he used his Micro Grant to attend NextGen:Charity.

The NextGen:Charity conference was advertised as a major happening with the best in of the non-profit world with opportunities for networking and professional development The advertisement said “1000+ leaders of the world’s top organizations”. At the event were maybe 300 participants and speakers altogether. Most of the programming had people giving slide shows to the entire conference with little audience participation. There were not many people with whom to network, and not much time to do it. Almost half of the workshops were about education, and a great many of the rest were motivaional-speaker-types who were trying to inspire us to follow our dreams. Virtually none of the speakers said anything that was clearly useful for me. For a $600 conference, I was disappointed. I imagine much of the cost of the conference was for the high profile speakers, many of whom, I must admit, were very engaging. Eric Saperstein, talked about the movie that he made about his cross-country drive, taking the most powerful people in the country out for coffee. Charles Best, the founder of donorschoose.org, spoke about the principle of peer-to-peer philanthropy, Craig Newmark described how he achieved success with craigslist. Someone looking for an opportunity to listen to accomplished people talk about their journeys would have enjoyed the event. Someone looking for a networking and professional development opportunity would be disappointed.