What We Can Fix About Service | Thomas Huo | TEDxYouth@AISG
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY3uUhDTqZc Video ID: ZY3uUhDTqZc ============================================================ morning everyone how many of you are involved in let's say an upper secondary Service Group I know some of our own CS members in here whoa whoa so many people okay wonderful this talk is mostly for you uh this talk is about what we can fix about service because there are a couple uh aspects that we're trying to encourage in our community that I don't think that we're doing too well and a lot of our Service Groups our main goal is to try to encourage people to explore New Perspectives and ideas about uh groups that they might not have seen before and how do you persuade people to engage with New Perspectives without forcing them into a Service Group our theme this afternoon is about globalization about emphasizing our need to think globally and act locally and as a service group we have very Noble intentions about trying to take our own time and use it to help a different group it's so that we can take our own time and make a positive contribution in our own communities service comes with a noble idea that and we truly have great service programs around the world and in our school of Hearts as well and it's very valuable because we can get students involved in these issues we can get them exposure to perspectives that they've never seen and we can get them experience which is what I think is most important about service uh these are some of the experiences that people in our own Service Groups have come to we've worked on trips to autism centers we've went to autism centers to work with children in them and to get uh to learn how to interact with them better we've also created our own mini lessons so what is wrong with service why am I talking to you today service is something that we're supposed to be willingly volunteering for but it's becoming a requirement in more and more places for example it's becoming a requirement in so many of from our student perspective so many of our college applications so many of our DP and IB curriculum requirements and it's not limited to only our school it's something that is become a requirement for many many students around the world now this might not necessarily be a bad thing on its own but a lot of people feel compelled to join service not because they want to help people or to work on a community that they care about but because it's something they're required to do they don't need to do it they just need to finish the hours required to do it we're making service into a check box rather than an innate passion that we can develop these are some just more sad to uh statistics about service in our current state of service after kova 19 our Service Groups have declined and as many as 50 percent of people after they leave high school and start working they don't have time they'll have the free time for service and this is a study by I think longevity at Stanford um right and we also carry a lot of unrealistic expectations for service I we are Us in the audience most of us are like 14 year old 17 year olds uh and in high school and none of us are going to understand the real complexities of the issues we deal with we as service coordinators and as members we're not going to understand how to properly interact with let's say autistic children in our own group or work with uh people with cancer we don't fully understand these problems when we enter service and this comes with some certain issues like we won't fully gauge the what they actually need and we might run the risk of being culturally insensitive oh this is uh made up statistic by me uh we won't fully understand what we're dealing with and um I have two examples to present this um uh we have there's a group called save the children uh in Ethiopia who is an NGO who's working on helping out Service Groups and helping out the people in Ethiopia but they've created a dependence on their services and when service is supposed to be about us giving to someone else it is now creating a dependency that they now have to rely on their local infrastructure no longer works very well we also have uh examples of Western ngos in Haiti post the 2010 earthquakes after the earthquake a lot of ngos descended on the country trying to help out donating food donating toys donating water sources but we didn't understand the cultural sensitivity around the issues and a lot of the food that these ngos donated went to waste and also caused stomach problems because it was just not sensitive to the local cultures involved what can we do about service about bringing about local Global Solutions because it seems like every example we have leads to more problems a service group cleaning up a local Waterway is not going to solve the global issue of pollution plastic uh production or landfills so we need a new way to define how we talk about service because these raised the question of Are We doomed to never actually understand the people we're supposed to help or how can every how can we ever solve the major issues that we face all the uh maybe we don't completely understand these issues maybe we as high schoolers or as adults we don't fully understand the communities that we serve but I think it's still very important to go out there and gain perspective about service to go out in the world and interact with like the communities that we try to serve because a lot of times when we think about service we think of it as too big of a global issue we aren't going to solve the issues of landfills or the issues of mass pollution on our own we aren't going to solve the issues of pollution nor are we going to solve the issues of climate change these aren't things that we can do on our own as individuals and a lot of times this has become a disconcerting reality that leads to us just not trying at all not caring about trying to help out the community because we feel like we can make no impact but I want to raise a example and an anecdote from my own life where I found a lot of value I got into trying to create service initiatives from a service trip with an eagle scout called zero way he graduated a couple years ago and one of my experiences in that service opportunity was going there and interacting with a woman who ran away from home started her own business and raised an autistic child on her own and she detailed a lot of her struggles about how raising her kid and how her kid often felt unincluded and not uh not understood by the people in her in her kids local community so I think what's I learned from that experience is we shouldn't approach service from the massive global scale that we've come to learn about I think we should approach service in the smallest scale that we can and our own lives in our own context because if we think about pollution and environmental disasters we are going to feel small and insignificant compared to that issue but if we think about a smaller issue pick an issue from your own life and develop that into some kind of service like what I talked about earlier about that woman caring about her autistic son and trying to get him the understanding and help that he needs these are some examples of some of the initiatives that we start in our own group to try to create more awareness this is part of a animation piece that we're working on it's still um uh in the works but we're planning to present it uh sometime April oh but I think the most important aspect of service is narrowing it into your own world view and not something major and massive that we have to deal with 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 because that's the best way we ourselves can gain perspective and that's also the best way that we can approach our Global issues we often think of service as again trying to solve this major issue that we'll never be able to complete ourselves but if we think of our ourselves think of it in a small unit like we're trying to make it so that that woman's child doesn't feel the need to feel ostracized or feel uncomfortable in her community if we think about local solutions to help out that one kid or help out that one community that we care about I think that's the way we should approach service thank you very much [Applause]