Power to the Youth

“What’s the point in learning facts within the school system, when the most important facts given by the science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society?” – Greta Thunberg

On 20 August 2018, a young woman started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament. What began initially as an individual effort to skip school on Fridays soon gathered momentum worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of students demonstrating as part of the Fridays for Future movement to demand stricter environmental protection policies from their governments. The voices of the global climate strikes are heeded: a network of 7,500 higher and further education institutions recently declared a climate emergency and pledged to address the crisis.

The young woman is Greta Thunberg, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month in a solar-powered yacht to attend the Climate Action Summit in New York. Thunberg is just one of this generation of youth that believe in their agency to facilitate social changes and to broadcast their events and concerns to engage people from all walks of life. Earlier in 2015, 21 youth filed a lawsuit against the US government for failing to protect them against climate change, despite knowing the connection between fossil fuels and climate change 50 years ago. “Us youth are eager to lead the climate movement. We want to lead in the courtrooms, in the classrooms, on the streets, at the dinner table,” said Kelsey Juliana, the lead plaintiff of Juliana v. United States, which has gained new support earlier this year from 30,000 youth and eight members of Congress.

The climate youth activism inspired by Juliana and Thunberg shows that youth are taking matters into their own hands to demand systems change. They have the power to organize, collaborate and innovate to create global impact, and climate justice is by no means the only world issue they want to tackle.

In 2010, Christopher Schrader, then aged 16, started the first 24 Hour Race in Hong Kong with his friend Aaron Sekhri to unite extreme youth endurance with philanthropy. Today, 24 Hour Race, an FSI portfolio company, is the largest student-run global movement to end modern slavery and human trafficking, raising funds to support anti-slavery NGOs while helping youth build social entrepreneurship and leadership skills.

Another FSI portfolio company started by youth for youth is MYEO. Initially a class project by Htet Thiri Shwe at The University of Hong Kong’s Social Venture Management Internship Course (more on the SVM Course below), MYEO is a for-profit social enterprise dedicated to easing Myanmar youths through personal, educational, and professional development challenges. Led by Htet, now a fellow at the Facebook Community Leadership Program, MYEO was nominated for multiple awards at last year’s ASEAN Rice Bowl Startup Awards for its positive impact over 69,000 youths through the sharing of opportunities, and a further 1,600 youths through its skills training workshops in 2018 alone.

At the young age of 12, Melati Wijsen co-founded Bye Bye Plastic Bags in 2013 with her sister Isabel. The youth-led NGO and movement to reduce plastic bag consumption now has 35 global teams, and has spoken at 329 events, reaching 45,000 students. The sisters have gone on to found other organizations, such as Mountain Mamas, which equips women living in the mountains with skills to make bags from donated and recycled materials, so that they can earn an additional income.

Having become one of the Lost Boys of Sudan at age four, Manyang Reath Kher started a new life in the US in 2005, when he was 17. Upon finishing college, Kher founded the nonprofit Humanity Helping Sudan, and later the ethically sourced, fair trade coffee company 734 Coffee, whose profits go to scholarships and education programs for Sudanese refugees. “Just because you are a refugee doesn’t mean you lost your marketable skills. Your intelligence does not go away just because you needed to escape your homeland due to war,” said the refugee-turned-entrepreneur.

At the age of 21, in 2014, Vincent Loka founded WaterROAM with two other undergraduates at a water initiative program at the National University of Singapore. The social enterprise develops portable water filtration solutions that bring fast access to clean drinking water, waiving the need for electricity, in disaster-hit locations, rural villages, schools, and health centers.

It was to Hong Kong, where many foreign domestic workers are forced into debt bondage by illegal placement fees charged by employment agencies, that Scott Stiles traveled for his summer internship in 2012. He was determined to work out a solution: an ethical, non-profit employment agency. Stiles, who made the 2018 Forbes list of “30 under 30”, was 23 when he co-founded Fair Employment Agency. Since 2014, Fair Employment Agency has placed more than 2,700 migrant workers in safe jobs while saving them from recruitment debt, and it has been setting new standards and best practices for the recruitment and training of migrant workers.

Also a Forbes “30 under 30” social entrepreneur, Ankit Kawatra founded Feeding India in 2014, when he was 24 years old, to combat hunger and food waste in India. The youth-led network of over 25,000 volunteers in more than 75 cities rescues and redistributes surplus food to the people in need. In addition to its community fridge program, Feeding India also sends food and relief materials to disaster-hit victims.

But we must not forget the numerous challenges faced by the youth of today. All over the world, more than 64 million youth are unemployed and 145 million young workers are living in poverty. Whereas 84% of youth in high-income countries are able to complete upper-secondary education, only 43% in middle-income countries and 14% in low-income countries are able to do so; almost 30% of youth between 12 and 14 years of age in low-income countries don’t have access to education at all. According to the United Nations, by 2030, more than 400 million children will have no basic primary education and 800 million young people will not have the skills required to join the workforce.

At FSI, we make youth empowerment one of our core missions. Our endeavors to future-proof the youth of today are exemplified in the Social Venture Management Internship Course (SVM Course), which is a six-credit experiential learning course at The University of Hong Kong that gives students the opportunity to gain hands-on business experience and strengthen their soft skills, by working directly at social ventures under the guidance of a faculty instructor and professional mentors.

Through the extensive portfolio of social businesses committed to tackling a wide range of issues from waste reduction, human trafficking, migrant labor rights to sustainable development and workplace diversity, the SVM Course does not only enable students to create social impact, but it also imparts in them the know-how on starting, operating, and scaling a social business while equipping them with the skills that are relevant to the field, such as impact measurement.

Another new semester has begun for the SVM Course as we speak, and we are as excited as ever in welcoming this new cohort of young people, who are passionate about facilitating positive social, environmental, and political changes that are much needed in the world today. If you are interested in volunteering your time and expertise to empower youth for a better tomorrow, get in touch with us!

We’re also reading…

• Subsidized homeownership could increase educational attainment and youth employment, a Mumbai program finds.

• There is a six-feet tall Buddhist priest weighing 70 pounds in a temple in Japan, and it is a robot.

• Establishing ESG protocols is more complicated than you think.

• VEGN, the world’s first vegan exchange-traded fund, has just been listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 10 September.

• Providing refugee women with employment opportunities could boost global GDP by US$1.4 trillion.

• Save elephants and whales, and we might just be able to find the cure for cancer.

• Want to be an ethical tourist in Sicily, Italy? Help these social enterprises by supporting mafia-free businesses.

• With a quarter of the world’s population facing a water crisis, the future of water supply may lie in recycled wastewater.

• In cities that are deemed food deserts, this solution can serve as a source for food banks, habitat for wildlife, and development space for workforce and leadership skills.

• Speaking of growing food, these organizations are using garden-based learning to improve young people’s academic and nutritional wellbeing.

• We’d like to hear your thoughts on these unconventional coworking spaces.