Many 18-to-24 year olds, whether they are Ivy League students or flipping burgers, see no good reason to vote.

I wouldn’t say they’re apathetic. They just don’t see politics as a means to an end.

Certainly not the way you might when you grow up in a family that can make things happen.

Most Americans, obviously, don’t grow up in a household where that is the nightly dinner discussion. My father would come home and talk about how one piece of paper in Washington, one piece of legislation, would have a very tangible effect on the lives of coal miners and steelworkers in West Virginia.

And it is their children you are trying to reach now?

Generation Engage got off the ground because we were frustrated with the outcome of the 2004 elections. Only 42 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted, which was 14 points below the national average. More young people voted in 2004 than had voted in 2000. However, if you went to college you are twice as likely to vote as you are if you didn’t go to college. We thought that if more emphasis had been placed on civic engagement in the cycle leading up to the election, rather than just on voter registration, a lot more young people would have voted. And we were frustrated with the millions of dollars being spent to make 30-second television commercials with celebrities telling young people to vote, which we thought was rendering voting as a fad.

Our thinking is that only by really being involved in your community do you start to connect the dots between what you need and how you can work for what you need within the political process. We wanted to replicate the kind of activism you find on college campuses for young people who haven’t gone to college. About 49 percent of the 25 million 18-to-24-year-old citizens in the U.S. don’t go to college. They don’t suffer from lack of interest; they suffer from a lack of access to the political process.

This is the demographic that joins the military, yet I rarely hear a campaign speech that says much about them.

There is a vicious cycle. Young people don’t have a lot of money, so politicians tend not to court their vote. Young people feel ignored and they don’t show up at the polls. Politicians see that young people aren’t voting and they don’t have a lot of money, and they ignore them even more. We want to show them by example that politicians are willing to listen and even respond. So we pay people from their ranks full-time salaries to form partnerships, both with other nonprofits and with the places where young people are already hanging out. They bring young people to attend forums with politicians or community leaders—either in person or by video conference.

There is a question-and-answer session where young people get to interact in a very real way with politicians or community leaders. We did one with Newt Gingrich the morning after this year’s State of the Union address.

What sort of questions do the audiences ask?

A lot ask how they can get jobs and what the job market is going to be like in the future. So this past April we asked Alexis Herman, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, to lead a discussion. She told her own story about struggling as a woman of color in the South, and other young people from the community told their stories. What’s especially exciting about the local discussions is that people get to know each other. We want to show young people that politics can be social and fun.

Is Gingrich a big draw?

Well, the most common comments we got were: "I never thought I was going to be speaking to Newt Gingrich. I never thought I would have an opportunity to interact with this national political leader. It was so easy, and really cool." We get the word "cool" all the time.

Wouldn’t Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie get a bigger audience?

Brad and Angelina, if you are out there and want to participate, we’ll talk. But we don’t want the focus to be on celebrity appeal. We want the real stars to be civic leaders and politicians and people who have given themselves to public life.

Could you make this happen without your own recognizable names?

The project would have died very soon after it began if the idea were not able to stand on its own. But whereas at first we were writing lots of letters to politicians asking them to participate, now we are actually receiving requests from them. About one-third of our funding comes from private individuals who, just as we are investing in young leaders at the local level, are investing in us. People invest in people. An idea can be great, but if you don’t have the right person backing it, it is not worth the investment.

You are frequently seen at political and cultural fundraising events. Seems that activism has been fun and social for you.

I sit on the board of the Alliance for the Arts, which lobbies for the arts. It is right at that intersection of art and politics that I love. At Yale I majored in politics, but I think I took more art history classes than politics classes. Generation Engage actually has a politics-through-art initiative. We did an event recently with Spike Lee and Michael Arad, who designed the World Trade Center memorial.

Another cause that is ingrained in every piece of DNA in the Rockefeller bloodline—Republicans and the Democrats—is that the environment is worth preserving; there’s a lot of emphasis on conservation, so I try to stay active in that field. I tutor in the Teague Fellowship program, which shows urban youth how to work for environmental causes.

I’m a person who has a fundamental flaw, which is that I try to please all the people all of the time, and I run the risk of spreading myself too thin. In the past, I’ve stopped working out and stopped sleeping and taking care of myself. New York City is the best. I absolutely adore this city. There’s so much to do that it can be problematic for a personality like me who wants to do it all.

For anyone, it is a long way from West Virginia.

We have a farm there in Pocahontas County, and we go back there a few times a year. As much as I love New York City, boy do I need fresh air. I don’t go out to the Hamptons. I never grew up as a beach person, and I like the woods more than the beach. I was born in West Virginia and lived there until I was 5½.

Do you think there is a connection between the life you knew there and your work with Generation Engage?

West Virginia absolutely gets me thinking about access. In New York City, there are multiple dry cleaners on every street. You can’t go anywhere in this city without access to something. In Appalachia, the mountains present serious limitations in terms of access—be it cell phone access or access to politicians. It did get me thinking about those issues.

How did your father happen to get there?

A friend told him you can’t know the world until you have seen its poorest places, and why not start with your own country? So he became a VISTA volunteer in Appalachia. He fell head over heels in love with West Virginia.

Political discussions among your family members must be explosive.

My grandfather, Charles Percy, was a moderate Republican who opposed the Vietnam War and made Richard Nixon’s enemies list. It’s one of the things he’s most proud of.

People are very respectful of other people’s views in the family. I think some in the family have wished that my great-uncle David had not given quite as much to the Republican Party in terms of bringing the Republican Convention to New York in 2004. But he adores New York, and it was the right thing to do for New York City. I agree with that decision, and I’m a Democrat. I can’t rightfully say that Uncle David is my mentor because I haven’t spent enough time with him. But he is maybe the person I know whom I respect the most. He is so kind, so smart, so accomplished. You walk through the Museum of Modern Art with him and he knows all the guards’ names. He doesn’t have to, but he does. And I can’t believe that he gets done everything that he gets done. I’m just an amateur.

Photograph by Thomas Hart Shelby.