Adrian Talbott is the founder and executive director of Generation Engage, a nonprofit voter recruitment organization created after the 2004 elections to rally the half of the young population that does not go to college.

Unlike more recent efforts, such as P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign, celebrities will not play a part in Generation Engage's plan to encourage 18- to 24-year-olds to join in the political process. Talbott, who helped run Democrat Erskine Bowles' 2004 Senate campaign, will rely on community volunteers rather than celebrity endorsements and popular slogans.

In a recent interview with NationalJournal.com's Jennifer Koons, Talbott discussed his goals for the organization and revealed how he's going to create a new constituency that candidates' won't be able to ignore. Edited excerpts follow. For previous Insider Interviews, click here.

Q: Where did you turn to for inspiration when creating Generation Engage? On your Web site, you talk about the creation of "community-based organizations staffed by standout, homegrown recent graduates." This sounds similar to the strategy employed by the Bush campaign in 2004. Are there certain groups or campaigns which you have modeled your organization after?

Talbott: ...We grew out of this last election and a pretty fundamental realization that responsible voters -- life-long voters -- are not simply the by-product of some magic combination of candidates, campaigns, political parties, but are made in communities where substantive political discourse is a part of their everyday social lives.

And that really is the great lesson of this last campaign, for everybody -- whether you're on the Democratic side or the Republican side, and whether you're happy about the last election or sad about the last election. We went through what, I think, everybody went through after this last election, which was a process of sort of self-evaluation and re-evaluation, self-examination. Regardless of your partisanship, it was a surprising election in a lot of ways....

What is missing in American politics... especially for young Americans, is grassroots social infrastructure. It doesn't matter how polished or refined a candidate's message is. It cannot be funneled into communities across this country without that grassroots social infrastructure there to receive and disseminate it. And that is a tough conclusion to come to for a lot people because nobody has quite gone after the problem that way. There [are] some really wonderful organizations, many of whom we all know and here about all of the time, who've really made some great progress in the field of youth civic engagement. Some of them are about finding the right message, the right series of issues that speak to young people. Some of them say, well it's not so much the message as it is the messenger -- the candidate. Others say, well, it's neither the message or the messenger, it's how you articulate the message, how you frame it so that it appeals to young people. That's how you'll get young folks out to vote.

Again, all those are well and good. We are approaching the problem from a different angle. We believe that to really engage young folks, especially our targeted demographic.... you've got to go from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Q: At first glance a young voter initiative is nothing new. Rock the Vote has been around for several cycles, and last year we saw the creation of P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign. What makes Generation Engage different from these groups?

Talbott: ... One thing we're doing that nobody else is doing is building at the local level this grassroots infrastructure that, right now, doesn't exist. So, no matter what the folks up top of the pyramid are trying to do, it has no where to go and no way to disseminate out to people.

We are hiring and training, and then of course employing, young local standouts in their own hometown communities. We're giving them the resources they need to connect young people with one another and with the political process at large. These are the type of folks we all know.... They are, again, young. They're locally based.... Those are folks that we're hiring and putting on the ground in North Carolina and Virginia in these two pilot programs over these next few months....

By building from the ground up... it allows us to have outreach that is, one, substantive -- not flippant mass-marketing campaigns that render voting a fad. Two, it's sustained and independent of election cycles. [It will] not pop up three months before an election and then disappear shortly thereafter. Three, we are genuinely inclusive of all political viewpoints. Four, and most importantly, we're explicitly targeting the 49 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds who aren't in college. ... For too long, [they] have been marginalized by the system....

It's our belief that these folks... are not apathetic. They absolutely are interested in affecting social change. They volunteer more than older generations. They engage in consumer activism more than older generations.... They just don't see the political process as a means of affecting that change. So what they need is a way to go about doing it....

Q: In targeting this population, you're aiming to get this group of young people to focus on politics. How do you get politicians to reciprocate your efforts?

Talbott: ... In Virginia, we are going to -- with our membership -- identify location venues where young people are anyways and we're going to market them under our own name, they're going to be Generation Engage hotspots. And we're going to go take advantage of where they're hanging out anyway and bring in more [young people].... And we're going to go to candidates and campaigns and say, "Hey, we've got 500 people at Joe's Tavern who are members of our organization.... They are young undecided voters. They're the best investment you can make because, one, they're undecided, and two, once you get them, you've got them for longer than anybody else. And then we're going to say, come talk to them...."

What is now a circuit that consists of... senior centers and moose lodges... will, when we're up and running, consist of Generation Engage hotspots and a chance to come and spend 20 minutes of your time to come to reach out to young people who are interested....

Q: How will you measure the success of your organization?

Talbott: We are not a youth voter initiative. We're a youth civic-engagement initiative.... Some people want to quantify there own success immediately by saying they registered "X" amount of voters; others say we drove turnout up by "X" amount of voters. I think they all make sense and all have to be done, but the problem is, voter registration is not synonymous with voter turnout. Which is to say, just because people sign up to vote doesn't mean they actually go out and vote. And one time voter turnout isn't synonymous with a lifetime of responsible voting.... It has to be a sustained effort. There has to be the type of outreach, the type of inclusion, the type of culture that exists over long periods of time. There's no sort of panacea to this thing. There's no quick fix that going to catalyze people to do it every four years. It's a civic-engagement thing....

Measuring success is harder for us, but it's not impossible. What is going to be the best measure of success when we're up and running in North Carolina is people. And it's going to be people who otherwise, were it not for our program, wouldn't be taking an active role in their own civic duty.

Q: What are your short and long term goals for organization? Will you try to have local contacts in every state by the 2008 elections?

Talbott: ... We've got to raise money to convince people that this is a worthwhile cause. I think we've done a good job doing it thus far, enough to be up in two states. The good thing about a pilot program is that you get to see what works, and what doesn't work. And we'll have a better idea of what really is, I think is a well-hashed out concrete plan a year from now, well I should say less than a year from now, because Virginia is an '05 election.... We'll give [North Carolina] our full push to 2006. The best we can do is turn around and say to folks, "look, this is our idea and it's worked. And we need your support to sustain it...."