Get ready for a glimpse into the future, when high-school and college students will teach the rest of us what being sustainable is all about. In Tacoma, your portal will open Saturday, Feb. 26, at the University of Puget Sound. There, a group of green-minded students hope to connect with local business owners and community leaders who are dedicated to a more sustainable future. It's called Focus the Nation, and if you're a local business owner or green-o-phile, you'll want to be there.

Focus the Nation at University of Puget Sound is one of dozens of conferences being held during a nationwide day of action supported by Portland-based nonprofit Focus the Nation. Here, the goal is to connect forward-thinking high school and college students with professionals in the Tacoma area who have integrated sustainability into their professional lives.

Professionals will have a chance to tap into the enthusiasm, novel perspectives and knowledge offered by kids who probably know as much, if not more, about sustainability as they do. Students and professionals will have a chance to interact with local organizations that are dedicated to sustainability, attend facilitated discussions (not as boring as a PowerPoint lecture) and make fresh connections. Students will have a chance to reach out to professionals who will probably want to hire them someday, or at least exploit them for the duration of an internship.

Witnessing the kind of smarts and conviction displayed by event co-organizer Emerson A. Sample, I can say with certainty that local professionals would do well to go check out the talent pool.

"I'm finally getting involved with the process of discussing sustainability and working for alternative energy like I thought I would in college. It means that there are more people like me out there, who have also harbored similar interests, and that when we get together we can encourage each other just enough to put something like this together," says Sample. "We have been committed enough to this cause. We've worked at it for five months, and now it's going to happen. The best part about it is that what we're trying to do here is just get things started. This motivation we have could just keep building and building into something unspeakably awesome."

Focus the Nation's founders are almost as enthusiastic about the environment as Sample is. Their organization's website speaks of its leaders being "driven by a fierce commitment to empower today's Millennials with the imaginative, civic and systems-thinking skills to become powerful agents of change in their own communities."

What is a Millennial? And why would anyone use such a creepy word when they could just say "young people"? Well, the Millennials are a different kind of animal. In fact, people like Sample and the organizers behind Tacoma's Focus the Nation represent a truly unique generation. According to Pew Research Center, Millenials are progressive, racially diverse and wield world-shaking spending  power and political influence (they are widely credited with helping elect President Barack Obama). Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, fellows at the Democratic advocacy group NDN, suggest that Millennials display group-oriented values of a "civic generation," i.e. they work together to get things done. Combine that with an innate, overall generational commitment to sustainability, and you might just see some unspeakable awesomeness on a global scale.

"Community involvement is the most fundamental part of sustainability," says event lead organizer Annie Bigalke. "When we can bring together diverse perspectives about our community, we can create discussions that will impact each other's lives that may have never existed. I am excited to learn from everyone and change my view of my community."

LINK: Registration and event information