What We Can Fix About Service | Thomas Huo | TEDxYouth@AISG
The speaker argues that service work is currently undermined by two issues: becoming a compulsory "checkbox" rather than a passion, and attempting to address overwhelmingly large global issues. The solution, illustrated by an anecdote about a single mother in an Autism Center, is to narrow the focus to the smallest, most local context that an individual can actively influence.
## Speakers & Context
- Unnamed speaker addressing upper secondary Service Groups.
- Target audience: Members involved in Service Groups.
- Overall theme: Emphasizing the need to think globally but act locally concerning service.
- Current service programming goal: Encouraging exploration of new perspectives and ideas without coercion.
## Theses & Positions
- Service should be approached voluntarily, not as a requirement for college applications or DP/IB curricula.
- Viewing service as a checklist risks turning it from an innate passion into a mandatory activity.
- Attempting to solve massive global issues (like pollution or climate change) leads to feelings of insignificance and inaction.
- Service should be approached at the smallest possible scale—within one's own life and local context—to gain tangible perspective.
- Local solutions, even small ones, are the best way to gain perspective necessary to approach global issues.
## Concepts & Definitions
- **Globalization/Global Thinking:** The need to view issues on a large scale.
- **Local Action:** Focus on immediate, tangible community interventions.
- **Service as a Checkbox:** The critique that service is being treated as a mandatory activity rather than a passion.
- **Cultural Sensitivity:** The requirement to understand local norms when engaging with a community to avoid unintentionally causing problems (e.g., waste from donated food).
## Mechanisms & Processes
- **Service Group Goal:** Encouraging exploration of new perspectives and ideas about community service.
- **Failed Service Models Illustrated:**
- **Ethiopia (Save the Children):** Creating dependence on outside services when local infrastructure was needed.
- **Haiti (Post-2010):** Western NGOs donating goods (food, toys) without understanding local cultural sensitivities, leading to waste and stomach problems.
- **Proposed Mechanism:** Narrowing service focus from massive global issues (landfills, pollution) to single, small units (e.g., helping one child in an Autism Center).
## Timeline & Sequence
- Decline in service: Service groups have declined since the "kova 19" (unspecified date/event).
- Time constraint issue: As many as **50 percent** of people lose time for service after leaving high school to work.
- Experience gaps: High schoolers and service coordinators do not fully understand the real complexities of issues like caring for autistic children or people with cancer.
## Named Entities
- **Save the Children:** An NGO working on helping Service Groups and people in Ethiopia.
- **Ethiopia:** Location where an NGO created dependency via service.
- **Haiti:** Location post-2010 earthquake where Western NGOs operated.
- **Autism Center:** Location used in the anecdote about a single mother.
## Numbers & Data
- **50 percent:** Percentage of people who allegedly lose time for service after high school to work.
- **2010:** Year of earthquakes in Haiti.
- **19:** Mentioned in reference to "kova 19" regarding service decline.
## Examples & Cases
- **Positive Experiences:** Working on trips to Autism Centers to learn how to interact with children.
- **Negative Case 1 (Ethiopia):** An NGO created a dependency on its services, preventing local infrastructure from functioning.
- **Negative Case 2 (Haiti):** Donating food and toys after the 2010 earthquake without cultural sensitivity resulted in waste and stomach issues.
- **Anecdote:** Interacting with a woman who ran away from home, started a business, and raised an autistic child, who detailed struggles regarding her child feeling unincluded in the local community.
- **Group Initiative:** Developing an animation piece to create awareness around service.
## Trade-offs & Alternatives
- **Trade-off:** The perceived noble intention of service versus the reality of its implementation leading to dependency or cultural offense.
- **Alternative:** Shifting from solving massive global issues (pollution, climate change) to solving small, localized problems (e.g., helping one child feel included).
## Methodology
- **Anecdotal Evidence:** Drawing from personal experiences, including the trip with an Eagle Scout named Zero Way.
- **Case Study Review:** Analyzing failures in NGOs in Ethiopia and Haiti.
- **Future Planning:** Creating an animation piece to raise awareness.
## Conclusions & Recommendations
- Approach service by narrowing the focus to the smallest scale possible—one's own immediate context.
- The best way to approach global issues is by mastering local solutions first.
- The goal is not to solve global issues, but to gain local perspective through local effort.
## Implications & Consequences
- If people only focus on global problems, they may become paralyzed by feeling insignificant, leading to inaction.
- Focusing on local units helps counteract the feeling of powerlessness when facing massive crises.
## Verbatim Moments
- *"we're trying to encourage people to explore New Perspectives and ideas about groups that they might not have seen before."*
- *"service is something that we're supposed to be willingly volunteering for but it's becoming a requirement in more and more places."*
- *"we're making service into a check box rather than an innate passion that we can develop."*
- *"we won't fully gauge the what they actually need and we might run the risk of being culturally insensitive."*
- *"we should approach service in the smallest scale that we can and our own lives in our own context."*
- *"it's about narrowing it into that one small example of a woman in an Autism Center working with her autistic child and teaching us how to better interact with kids and how to better interact with the people in our community."*