Relevant Media Group is a publishing company that has targeted twentysomething men and women for 10+ years. In a new free magazine called Reject Apathy, publisher Cameron Strang focuses on global needs and responses. Tapping into a demographic that wants to make a difference, Strang believes education and empowerment will lead to lasting change – and this group with an entrepreneurial bent can lead the charge. We talked with Strang, 35, in his Winter Park, Fla., office about the new magazine and what led to the new publication available to Relevant magazine subscribers and on college campuses across the nation.

What led you to start Reject Apathy?

Cameron Strang: Relevant [magazine] covers faith and life and culture. What we realized in trying to maintain this kind of unique balance in the magazine is that it limits our ability to talk about stuff we want to talk about – like social justice. And there’s a lot to talk about but we couldn’t devote 20 pages to it without changing what the magazine was.

This summer, we’ve launched Reject Apathy, which has been three years in the making, and it’s a magazine giving voice to the social justice movement in our generation: living intentionally and sacrificially, advocating for sustainable change and change that we can tangibly see happen if we’re committed to it. The first issue came out and it was important to us. It’s a tough sell like trying to get me to buy a magazine about social justice, you know.  So we’ve decided we’ve got to make this free, and so it took a long time to figure out the business model to make it free and we were able to do that.

“We knew that when we launched Reject Apathy that it had to start with an impactful presence.”

So every subscriber to Relevant gets it for free now twice a year and we are distributing 150,000 copies at events in colleges across the country, and so we’re really excited about that. We knew that when we launched Reject Apathy that it had to start with an impactful presence. We’re committed to that level and increasing that level as we move because we feel like we have to get this in front of people.

We’re giving it away for free, and we’re just basically invading your space with it. You have to make it accessible and engaging in its design to make it engaging.

You mentioned the importance of good design and photography. There’s a rise in humanitarian photography, people who are approaching their art in a very different way than it used to be. That’s the type of photography you’re featuring in the magazine, correct?

Strang: I think you can thank Scott Harrison and Jeremy Cowart for this whole movement. You remember obviously Scott Harrison was in the nightclub scene. He’s the founder of charity: water who is absolutely doing it the right way. You know 100 percent goes to the field and I’m just a huge fan of the organization and Scott personally. He was living a life of excess and you know everything a young guy ever wants in New York, he was empty and so he left it all and went and served with [Mercy Ships] for a year as a photographer. It changed his life, and when he came back, he wrote the whole story for us in Relevant. That was a real catalyst for what he ended up doing thereafter, which is launching charity: water, but he told the story of like you know seeing the world through this lens. You know the lens of the photographer and seeing the beauty and the pain. You know the power of that medium to tell stories and move people and not in a guilt way but in a hopeful way, and I think charity: water better than the other organization has used beautiful media and beautiful imagery and video to tell a very compelling and hopeful story. And I think that’s why they’ve actually done so well is they’ve seen the power of photography and power of video.

Jeremy Cowart came to a pretty similar place when he went to Africa in 2005 as a photographer. And we published a photo book [from that] called Hope in the Dark.

“I think charity: water better than the other organization has used beautiful media and beautiful imagery and video to tell a very compelling and hopeful story.”

And Jeremy’s story is interesting too because that book he did with Relevant opened the doors in Hollywood for him to shoot celebrities and TV shows. And I think that’s a good example of someone pursuing what they love and with purpose and it opening doors for them.

Strang: Our generation is very entrepreneurial, and I think it’s interesting that the social justice movement in our generation is very entrepreneurial. It’s not just, you know, I’m sponsoring a child or I give my missions check or whatever it is, which is all good, but it’s like I’m going to go start something, you know. It’s just a totally different mind-set than I think it was before.

[Show as slideshow]

For more from Relevant magazine, check out its new free iPad app that released this week, available from iTunes.