Want to Make a Change? Let Young People Tell Their Stories | Anshul Tewari | TED

In 2008, when I was 17, I felt invisible. And not like Harry Potter with an invisibility cloak. I actually felt really powerless. I remember watching the news every single day with my parents. It was like a ritual in our house. And the more I saw it, the more I realized that I just couldn't relate with it. The people didn't look like me, the issues didn't feel like mine. And more than anything, young people's voices were nowhere to be found. Now I have grown up in a family where everybody cared deeply about what was happening in the world. So naturally we had a lot of conversation at home. I had many opinions, many perspectives and experiences that I wanted to share with the world, but there was absolutely nowhere to go. My friends who I spoke with, my teachers who I spoke with, they all reminded me of the only thing that mattered, and that was how I performed in my exams. And that's it. (Laughter) So I was extremely disappointed, very frustrated. And the only thing that I knew and I loved was writing. So I started a blog. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I just went online and I started writing, and I forced my friends to read what I was saying. My first story was actually about climate change, and I remember asking a friend to read it, and she went ahead and she commented on it. And the comment was a smiling emoji. So I was disappointed because I wanted more. I realized that, you know, a lot of us young people, we grew up in this culture of silence. We are told, don't question, don't think critically, don't ask too much. And that was something that really frustrated me. I loved writing, like I said, so I thought that I'll do something interesting. I launched a writer's training program. Young people, they want better jobs, they want to be skilled, so I thought I'll skill them in writing. And by that time, by the way, I had about a thousand readers on the blog. So I thought about 30 people will apply. At least 30 people will apply for this program. And to my surprise, only two did. (Laughter) So I took those two and gave them the best that I had. Every single day, I would train them on how to write better. But what they were writing about was actually tough issues. Gender, discrimination, climate change, issues that we are not taught to talk about. And something slowly began to shift in them. The more they wrote, the more they began to question. They started acting. They started wondering why things were the way they were. And that motivated me to go school to school, college to college, sticking up posters, asking more and more young people to join me. Slowly and steadily, a community began to form. And that blog became Youth Ki Awaaz, or Voice of the Youth, India's largest citizen media platform, where today more than 200,000 young people are writing on issues that are deeply underrepresented every single month. (Applause) And this was not just young people coming together and ranting. This was young people coming together and telling stories that were not being told anywhere. So let me tell you about Ashwini. Ashwini was a medical student studying in the state of Rajasthan. And he had this phenomenal habit. Every single summer break, he would go to the closest village and provide free medical services. So he went to this village called Rajghat, a couple of kilometers away from the city of Jaipur in India. And when he went there, what he found was far more than a medical crisis. There was absolutely no clean drinking water. There were no proper roads. There was no electricity. And he realized that there were no schools at all. And no weddings had taken place in the last 22 years because nobody wanted to send their daughters to a village which was so impoverished. Imagine a village of single men. (Laughter) But like I said, Ashwini saw this as more than just a medical crisis. He wanted to do so much more for Rajghat. So he collaborated with us, and he told the story of Rajghat on Youth Ki Awaaz. It slowly and steadily began picking attention. Thousands of people found out about Rajghat, NGOs came there, the first time in many years decision makers came to Rajghat and support began to rally. The courts took suo motu cognizance and asked the government to act. Slowly, electricity came to Rajghat. The first-ever school was built in Rajghat as well. And -- (Applause) And guess what? The first wedding in 22 years. (Applause) And Ashwini was not alone. After Ashwini, we saw Jolly's story. Jolly was a wheelchair user. Struggled her entire life to find accessible toilets.

Her story went so viral, was read by more than a million people in less than a week, including the HR of her organization, that all the toilets at her workplace were reconstructed for her. After Jolly came Rayees. Rayees talked about how there was a complete lack of menstrual hygiene awareness in the state of Kashmir in India. And his story sparked one of the largest menstrual hygiene awareness campaigns in Kashmir. And for Pranay, his story led to the rescue of his father, who was stranded in Libya during the Arab Spring. And not just that. Eighteen thousand Indians were brought back to the country because his story made an impact. (Applause) Now, these are not anomalies. We saw hundreds of them over the years, and what we realized was that we were really building individual agency. We were enabling a muscle, the muscle of change making. But as the platform grew, the world became a lot more complex, we realized that the issues are also becoming very complex. It's difficult to get heard more and more, the louder the world gets. And climate change seemed like this faceless, shapeless, this mammoth of a beast that we just did not know what to do about. Thousands of young people had written about climate change on Youth Ki Awaaz, but it was almost like we were talking at it. We didn't know what to do about it. So in 2023, we decided to do something different. We decided that we are going to collectivize these voices. So we launched a campaign called ZeroSeHero. The idea was very simple. We'll bring together young people, we'll get thousands of their stories, and we'll build a common platform where young people, decision makers, businesses, nonprofits, they can all come together to talk about something that climate experts love to talk about: net zero. Nobody understands it. We wanted people to understand it. This is the reality. So ZeroSeHero started. We ran thousands of polls, we ran many surveys, we trained thousands of citizens to tell their climate stories in their own way. And slowly the campaign became a national campaign. People started talking about it in closed circles, it became a public conversation. We started organizing dialogues with policymakers and young people on the same dais, and things began to move forward. We noticed a larger net-zero conversation happening in India. So in 2023, we did something else as well. We partnered with India's National Institute of Urban Affairs to co-create the country's first youth engagement frameworks that puts young people at the center of climate decision making in cities. And this year we are beginning to roll it out across the country in multiple cities, along with city governments. And this -- (Applause) And this really changes the perspective. We were building individual agency. And we realized that at some point we're actually building collective agency as well. We're trying to move things forward a lot faster. But this generation, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, gets criticized a lot and I'm here for them. It's very important to stand for them. What we realized was that for the younger generation, it's very important to build the reflex of change-making as something that is as simple as texting a friend, something that really makes them feel like they're beginning to participate. They're beginning to change the conversation somewhere. So this year, we're beginning to use AI to do that. We are building the country's first WhatsApp bot that uses AI to send thousands of young people in our community one single question on a critical issue a day. Answering this makes them realize that critical thinking is deeply important, but in return, we get access to critical data about what young people are thinking, the future that they're imagining, so we can make better use of it, and talk to policy makers about things that truly matter. And let me also tell you one very important thing, which is that this kind of work cannot happen on your regular social media. Social media is not built for social change. It's built for vanity. It's not built for equity. Right? (Applause) It's unfortunately built to enhance the loudest voice, not necessarily the most authentic. So what does this mean? This means that we need to invest in storytelling. We need to invest in collectivizing voices. And that means we need to invest in community. We've built a blueprint for how we can do it in India, and we cannot wait to take it across the world to every single young person. Thank you. (Cheers and applause)