At a time when so many organizations are faltering because of the economy or the Madoff scandal and other organizations spend tons of money on parties or concerts, the NLC has tangible results in leadership development that grows young people into a generation of political and organization workers.

Their event on Sunday was great. I was able to connect with old friends and meet with new ones. Newly elected State Rep from Maine spoke, as did California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

Monday I had a great lunch meeting with a few people who are also leaders in the youth movement. While the purpose of the meeting was truly just to catch up, shop talk ensued and we shared our fears of the new administration only paying a lip-service to the youth movement and trying to funnel us all into "service" rather than meaningful policy initiatives.

For example: one member of our party lamented that the Obama Administration didn't have a youth representative working with any economic recovery or jobs packages or efforts. There is a huge focus on labor and helping older workers develop new tech skills so they have options in the jobs market. However, there is an entire generation graduating ... possibly the largest graduating class in our nation's history who is just now entering the work force with these skills already... and yet our generation has a 20% unemployment rate.

Why aren't young people or a rep from our generation anywhere near the table when discussing these issues, particularly since we have a much higher unemployment rate even with the skills policy makers say are necessary to get jobs??

Our further fear/discussion was that the Obama Administration will simply continue to pat us on the head and we will miss out on any real meaningful possibilities of engagement. When the Administration Youth Liaison met with leaders of the youth movement she commented that the one thing the youth movement wanted as a unit was a seat at the table. The fear we discussed at lunch was that those seats at the table will be minimized to meaningless outreach tools that merely create an appearance of engagement.

Perhaps we have a complete lack of trust from our years of experiencing what I just described to believe that an administration will actually consider us assets to policy initiatives.

Initial thoughts, I will have more on the insane disasters we saw at the actual Inaugural ceremonies and the pointlessness of the Youth Ball that had so much promise but in the end was a total FAILURE.