Online Synchronous Youth Dialogue on Social Affairs

There are so many pressing problems everywhere on this planet. None of us can get away from global or local economic, social, and environmental issues in this connected world. One issue has multiple factors intertwined at the deeper level and solution to each problems can’t be made in one-fix. The issues are becoming complex and requires inter-disciplinary solution. 

For example, at a personal level, career and family life balance is also pressing both young women and men in many parts of the world. High unemployment rate of youth all over the world, especially in developing countries will be intense. (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.ZS) Many countries will suffer from these issues and need to tackle from different directions.

Moreover, since the social environment changes promptly, many new problems that have not occurred in the past arise. For example, technology or social media addiction in youths. Mental health of youths is up to Big Tech’s business approach.

Such social problem is beyond the control of one individual and such issues will be left untouched if no action is made. History shows that unless there is a wake-up call, we will unfortunately see unexpected tragedies including youths suicide due to cyberbullying and social comparison.    

The youth, who have less power to make a strong impact on politics and economic decision making are living in a vulnerable environment compared to that of their parents’ generation, where tension of geopolitics is intense and economic competitions are becoming harsh in the increasing competitors in the market. Moreover, the youths population living in Asia are shrinking (https://www.unfpa.org/sites/de... ) compared to that of the aging population. Also, youth voting rates are low even in the US, where youth votings are somewhat high in OECD countries 

Many of the participants in our group observe the incidents happening in the world and feel powerless. Even though the incidents are occurring at the other end of the ocean, they feel at a loss and want to do something, however, don’t exactly know what to do. We believe that many of the youths share the same sentiment.

Another problem is that because of the information overload, people may fall into confirmation bias. This will limit one’s view and lead to unproductive outcome. Finding trustworthy meaningful data is not an easy task on the internet.

Internet is the source of “echo chamber,” where like-minded voices will amplify a skewed view, which leads to a negative output. It is a challenge to find multiple perspectives that one can ponder and make decisions based on one’s criteria to make a healthy decision.

Lastly, on the bright side, like many participants in our events, young people are keen to learn about things they don’t know outside of their society. Our target audience is youths in the twenties, who started to have a stake in society and establish their positions. For example, participants were surprised why there are so many Women Universities in some Asian countries and they would never known the fact unless they joined the event.

Our solution is to establish a digital platform that youths can connect, exchange information and ideas, and discuss the issues. We would run a discussion event on Zoom with a topic on social affairs. (The past discussion topics are here: https://www.tada-ed.com/global)

The following description explains how the previous problems can be resolved or alleviated.

For resolving complex issues, multiple stakeholders need to collaborate to resolve the issues. For example, global warming, urbanization, and food security have been raised over years and won't be solved unless each stakeholder would discuss the issues at the same table and take initiative aligned with the common goal. As for an exercise, our digital platform can be a place to train youths' discussion skills.         

The social and economic environment, in which the youths live is volatile. Macro trends such as shrinking population of youths or increasing population of aged are seen in Developed and Asian countries. Whereas, increasing number of population in Africa is also acute. If we were to have youths from different areas to discuss these issues, can we get any insights? At least, when youths start to understand the status quo of their nation and region,  Won’t they start thinking about their future?  

We believe that “indifference” is the last attitude we should take. Even if we can’t resolve the issue directly, by showing interest and being aware of the situation is the first step. If we are ignorant, we would never find any measures to resolve the problem. However, if we keep the antenna up and when some opportunity arise, to donate, to cast a vote, or to join a protest, we will be part of the solution. Also, by being aware that other youths share the same sentiment, s/he is not the only one and might make him/her feel to take an action.  

We live in an age, where misinformation and disinformation abound. It is all up to the individuals to make proper decision as to which information to rely on and trust.

In the platform, participants will be able to ponder the idea/information coming from a reliable source or explore whether they are not biased. Even when we are not sure, we can check from multiple perspectives and make sure if our assumptions are wrong and the avoid our discussion flowing to a wrong direction.  

The event will be a try-out session for the participants to explore how they can brainstorm and come to a consensus. Some sessions might ended up having a biased view. However, that is OK, since this is a place to exercise. It is a challenge for the organizers to find those output and address what implication it has, so in the end, the participants will be all on the same page.    

The platform will provide youths to share information that they are familiar to people who are unfamiliar with the matter. Teaching equals to learning, so this is a great opportunity to learn about their mutual society.

Our solution will serve the youths at their twenties, who have interest in their future, motivated to make the most of their lives, and eager to live a better life than yesterday in anywhere in the world. In addition, not only these people will have interest in themselves, they also have interest in learning about cultures or societies outside of their own. They have the communications skills to convey their concern, thoughts, or views.

Some people live in an area, where there is limited access to global audience, such as non-English speaking African/Asian countries. Even when English is a challenging tool, making connections with global peers and exchanging ideas are assets. They are looking for something new or something not seen in their countries and keen to learn.

Youths in zone of conflict, such as Palestine also have limited access to the outside world. They want to convey what is happening in their daily lives. We welcome these youths, who are living in a very intense condition, however, have keen interest in the outer world.

Youths from developed countries, who look for new learning opportunities outside of their community or society will gain knowledge and network from our platform. 

Our discussion foundation will offer participants to gain learning opportunities to teach and learn mutually from a civilian perspective. Learning is at essence, stimuli-reaction neuro process that happens in an individual, however, we want to provide an environment that we give stimuli and reaction reciprocally and evolve to make meaningful and productive discussions. Because we don't rely on experts, we facilitate our discussions on our own. Of course, we may make mistakes because we are humans, however, we will learn from that mistake and rectify those errors to make better decisions next time. This way participants will learn how to “think” and make decisions, which is equally critical to gaining knowledge.   

Also, the solution creates awareness among the youth and lays the foundation for networks of youth who have different backgrounds, but share the same concerns and priorities. It impacts their lives because it gives them a chance to explore more about the issues that they are concerned about and strengthens their advocacy campaigns. It also gives them a chance to learn from each other's perspectives on how to address these issues and the extent of the threats they are concerned about. 

We have a public Facebook page with 1K followers mostly from non-English speaking natives. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any of the followers yet in our events. We are surely gaining interests from the peers. Because we are all aware that issues are piling up and if necessary, we have to take action in each circumstance. Usually, when language other than their local languages get into the picture, people will hesitate to get involved. We may be able to assume that people are aware of risks and want to get involved in the discussions in language other their native tongue. We are making impact on those secondary target audience.  

Three years have passed ever since we started this endeavor, and surprisingly, even if the number is still small, there are participants showing interest in this activity. Some disappeared and some is staying with us and even volunteer to take care of the administrative tasks. 

The admin youth team runs/organizes the events, update the website, and coordinate joint events. 

They are gaining learning opportunities, discussion skills, comrade, and etc. Each get something out of it and we believe it’s acceptable, whatever they are. As of now, we are happy to get members with various intention and objectives. Moreover, since  we don't have face-to-face meetings almost at all, it is a surprise that trust can be established only on digital interactions. Due to the fact that the organizer is from Japan, where human face-to-face communications are heavily depended on building relationship, this experience is astonishing and very special. 

Not only admins, however, youth participants are also juggling busy work and study schedules. They make time to join or run the tasks between their daily chores. 

We serve the youths audiences everywhere in the world, who are interested in learning social affairs ongoingly changing the world that may impact their future and other people in the society. We share our views, thoughts, and ideas, so that we can also take action to make this society to a better place. 

We keep asking how we can leverage ourselves to bring us to the next level and find feasible goals to challenge ourselves. We are growing and evolving to make this platform an attractive place for the peer audience.

First, we are thinking of adopting the focused theme approach. We have covered several topics at one event, such as; World Happiness Report, Staggering levels of migration, Great Youths Talents; Seven Biggest Environmental Threats, AI job interview, Rich-Poor gap in the US; etc. (https://www.tada-ed.com/global-discussion-for-youths) However, to deepen our discussion, we are thinking of changing the style so that we can delve into the topic and exchange more ideas. 

Also, we consider that it is surely crucial for us to keep expanding our dialogue between participants, we can also describe how the discussions manifest after sessions. For example, we can think if the discussions can be turned into essays, visual representations, or songs and explore an approach to generate new perspectives. We also try to restructure the way we discuss, so that everyone will see more value in the discussion. 

We also organizing the second joint event with Time for Tea. (https://www.time4tea.info/time-for-tea-goes-global/) The first one was conducted end of last year and the two group had an online discussion event. Since it was the first online event for Time for Tea, we took the initiative and took care of the logistics. We are hoping to maximize such opportunities, so that we can meet new youths and exchange ideas, which is welcomed by our existing participants.

We believe we are well positioned to serve our global audience.  

The imminent issue we face is the access to youths in the twenties. Member recruitment is high priority. Some of the people in this generation have already finished school and at work.  

We introduce our activity and contact the youths group, however, there are limitations with our restricted man-power and low profile.

A group of youths that are interested in learning and discussing social affairs are not the majority of the society as of now, however, we assume that these category of people will grow slowly.

Thus, if SOLVE team will be able to give us opportunities to show our presence, this will help the world to know us.

Moreover, if SOLVE can offer advice on how we can develop, we don't know how we can appreciate. Even offering a place to connect with youth group community will be helpful for us to encounter some youths, who might be interested in our activity.   

Another area of improvement we can make is the use of technology. We are interested in using apps/technology platform that we can co-create the output of our discussion. Or, if we can have an AI interpreter/translator on our discussion platform, this will definitely lower the language barrier and welcome participants speaking in languages other than English.Personally speaking, I am interested in exploring this challenge. If we have AI interpreter, I wonder what may happen. FB enabled people to connect with friends. If we have AI in our platform, this will enable people to vocalize their thoughts on social affairs and heard by members, who don't share the same language. It is thrilling to think that members will be able to reciprocally interact on the platform with global audience. Thinking that there are quite a number of followers, there might be some unexpected outcome, however, it surely is a worthwhile challenge to take up.

In order to execute the last requirement, funding will be necessary. 

This is a new learning space for for any youths who want to learn about the social issues for the own better future and unknown future of others. This platform will challenge youths with different backgrounds and diverse experiences to come up with ideas, which might directly lead to solutions or might implications to the events happening in our society. We encourage youths to have passion and high intention to ponder ideas and create an ideation in the area of civic issues that prevail in the world and occur in some specific region. 

Our initiative is to challenge how we can raise this civic awareness with the global youths. We are making trial and errors to make our events attractive to the audience. Because we don’t have a predecessor or a sponsor, we are reaching out to participants in a green root approach. Interestingly, our members are growing steadily and we are becoming a group. This is an evidence that youths out there share the same sentiment that they hear/see eye-catching news, feel like they want to speak to someone about it and share their views, and get connected with peers of the same generation. Thanks to the internet, the world is becoming a place where we have access to the news. We instantly know what is happening around us. However, this information overflow will give us strains than the past that we can’t neglect anymore. Some websites are places that blow up with complaints and slanders. We believe such places will bring us nowhere.We need dialogues to think and learn more about the issues.   

We encourage participants to improve their knowledge and decision making skills, so that we can make appropriate judgements and take action accordingly. We believe having stronger thinking skills that might not be falsified by fake news is critical to maintain our existence as a group. This is the first platform to raise civic awareness in youths. We strive to engage more youths to become better decision makers so that we can make a sustainable future together.

Eventually, we envision to work with the local youth group that expand in many nations. We will be able to reach out to youths with different experience and knowledge. Also, we do like to see voluntary cohorts like ourselves in many parts of the world. If this is to occur, this has an enormous impact to society in the long run. Can we imagine the ordinary global youths talking about what is currently happening in the financial world and discussing how banking system and digital money will co-exist in the future? We want to make this exciting things to happen.  

This has an enormous impact on society in the long run. If we have more members of the society, who are considerate and have more interests in civic movements, our society will be much more healthy in the sense that we would learn how we should make decisions and take actions in this chaotic world.

For 2024, we have qualitative and quantitative ongoing impact goals to achieve. 

First, we would like to attract more number of youths and learn global issues together. Regular members are still first digit, however, we are growing slowly to open break-out rooms for deeper discussion. Regular attendants are the ones that join the event more than twice a year. One time drop-in will usually do not come back and these people are interestingly less.

Not only that we want more people, we want to have more variety of members, from different regions and discipline, so that the group will have multi-perspectives. “English speaking” is a requirement, so youths from countries, which don’t speak English as a native language may shy away. However, the ones who can, living in the country where they don’t have opportunity to speak the language, may find this platform luring. Our job is to find those people and get connection, run ongoing marketing and joint event with similar cohorts, and win a position to support our activity like SOLVE.

Another area, we need to strengthen is to have more admin members, so that we have more flexibility to run the events. Youths members have busy schedules, so we need to make the tasks minimal and easy to manage. These days, the youths are taking challenging tasks as facilitator of the session, and this is such an improvement from an organizer perspective. Once the senior admins become the role model, there will be followers in the admin group.   

Lastly, we also want to improve the quality of our discussion process and output. We want to bring our member to become deep thinkers so that we can establish a virtuous cycle; think deep, come back to discussion to train, apply those thinking process in other areas. We are also thinking to incorporate to bringing in experts to our events to facilitate our discussion or creating discussion output into art, music, or writing, so that we can post those work in our website. 

As for the next five years, we target bringing scale and promoting youths’ independent management. 

We are running events in quarterly basis in Eurasia time zone. If members want to have more frequency of events, that is an option. Or, if there is a need to run events in America time zone, that is also wonderful.If there is a group who wants to manage multiple events on a specific topic, that is also worth considering. We are open to all ideas.

Eventually, we are looking for youths who may want to run these events autonomously. Plan the dates, come up with the themes, and send out the invites on their own. It may be a luxury to have such motivated youths, however, if we have the luck to encounter such youths and if we keep on improving our platform into an attractive place for the youths, this is not a dream.

There are two measurement criteria: quantitative and qualitative.

The former includes participants rate increase, participant region expansion, participants engagement, increase in number of events. I have referred to this in the previous questions, so let me just touch on the rise of proportion of youths from the developing countries. Thinking of the high ratio of overall population in the developing countries, we hypothesis that more percentage of members will come from developing countries. However, due to languages barriers or technology limitations, this might not be the case. 

In regards to qualitative indicators, output quality will prove the advancement of impact. Currently, we are working on how we can keep record of the output by leaving a summary for each session so that we can establish the new session based on the past outcome. We are also planning to incorporate a way to call for visual/audio works or writings. We would collect the summary or concept map as the discussion ouput and ask for volunteers to come up with such art and writings. This might bring in members who are not eager to speak English, however, talented in expressing ideas in a non-verbal approach. We will see how it goes. 

Another area that influence the quality is the the shallow discussion that only throws one’s ideas, which makes the discussion segmented. We would like to improve our facilitations skills so that we can be more inclusive and elicit multi-perspectives that will bring more insights and new ideas to our discussion.  

Another element in qualitative category is behavioral change in the group. I would like to see more members be active in voicing out their perspectives in postings that we have in our Facebook page. This is what we are working on at this stage. We want to make our platform a safe place to express our thoughts. A platform comfortable enough to call out their views. Speaking in the online events are very limited, so we hope to make the online space a seamless environment to shout out. Along this line, raising discussion topics are one of the heavy-load of work, so it’s preferable that we see more posting coming from the youths. Eliciting youths motivation will have a ripple effect for other youths to challenge themselves not only make contribution to this online community, but, will certainly train their skills to think on their own. We don’t hesitate to try new things so that we can pick up new exciting things and dispose needless approaches that hinder our development. 

In terms of UN Sustainable Development Goals, our activity supports the realization of Target 4.7. In our discussion we promote the audience to acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development. We learn what sustainable development is, what sustainable lifestyles means to each locals, discuss human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

In our discussion group, we have two types of participants. One are the youths, who want to access new information or knowledge unknown to them, so that they can apply them in their own environment. 

Another type are the ones, who are concerned about the social issues; financial crisis, global warming, and war, to name a few. Youths are not ignorant to these events and some are at a loss what to do or how they should respond to these social phenomena. 

Moreover, those youths, who are attentive to such issues must be spread out in the world. 

Our initiative is to connect such youths, exchange ideas, think the topic from different perspectives, and have them think on their own feet.

From experience, we know that one individual can list out limited solutions to an issue. However, we hypothesize that if we can list the whole feasible solutions and apply a holistic view to the problem, the measures we can take will be sorted.

If we repeat this thinking exercise, the youths themselves will be able to think differently or take actions in an alternative way, or eventually solve the issues that are close to them.

Even considering that having dialogues on issues in other part of the world will make a huge difference than being “indifferent” to incidents happening over the ocean. This is because the incidents happening in other part of the world might impact on one’s life in the future, if not now. Humans becomes serious when things might impact on their own future. This is human nature. World is becoming a closed space and find no place to avoid risks, so that one problem will spread like a ripple and the next problem comes right after. Thinking about oneself in another person’s shoes will open a new territory.    

Our initiative hypothesize that once young participants can think on their own, other youths will also mirror them. （Modeling: Bandura, or Mirroring) The others will mimic the early adopters and more and more youths will start to exchange ideas and think aloud. In the long term, this will lead to indirectly/directly alleviating or solving the issues around us. 

This process surely will take some while to happen. However, we believe that one drop of water leads to an ocean.  

We use Zoom to connect the youths all over the world to share information, exchange ideas, and come up with some brilliant insights and ideation to tackle the difficult issues surmounting in our society from the Himalayas to the deep ocean in the Mariana Trench. If we don’t have this modern technology, there is no way that we can connect and exchange our ideas synchronously. 

Diversity is our strengths, so we strive to seek how much we can be creative online. We are still working on seeing how we can become creative thinkers by changing the theme or changing the number of participants. As we are making trials and errors, it is worth trying to see how we will evolve in the long run. 

We are also exploring how we can create our ideation into digital artifacts, such as poems, art, or music. We will try out and see how things will work out. We would keep on experimenting how we can make impact on society by the output we make in the digitally connected platform.

If we had the chance to incorporate AI translation technology into Zoom, we will be able to welcome non-native English speaking youths to our community. This will surely become an exciting endeavor to see in the future.  

We believe that technology can maximize human intellectuality, emotion, and sensuality for the better good.

We respect diversity, equity, and inclusion of the youths in the twenties wherever they reside in the world. 

Diversity is the life-blood of our activity, since we believe having multiple perspectives are essential to cultivate creative output and solution to world issues. We hypothesize that looking things from a big picture will enable us to see things clearly and make appropriate decisions.Thus, we welcome people from different discipline, various background, and identity. These factors will be our strength when we discuss on diverse topics. Nobody is all-mighty in all the topics, so it is preferable that we have members from different knowledge and experience. However, since we speak in English, we might be limiting our audience by language barriers due to our technology restrictions.  

During the recruitment stage, we have opened access to global youths. On our rulebook, we address that we should respect one another and listen to each member. Fortunately, we have never had complaints or issues that has violated this act.

One time, we bumped into a group of street youths and welcomed their participation, however, unfortunately, we were the one denied. The group organizer said that she has seen her members been treated unfairly and biased, so she would not introduce the members to us. We have invited her to join our event, however, she never showed up. It is a shame that we were considered like the other groups that do not know how to appreciate equity.

In terms of inclusion, some youths speak English as second language, so their arguments are not clear. When the organizer facilitates such sessions, she will ask the presenter their points for clarification and make everyone understand. In some of those cases, the admins will rephrase the comments so that we will be on the same page. This way, we try to respect one another and promote inclusion. Another cases, where we had a participant from French speaking Africa, who was very ardent in joining the event, however, was not able to make the point. In such case, the organizer advised him to listen to the discussions and prepare a short English comment for the discussion points raised upfront. This way, we will be able to avoid language barriers, which becomes the hindrance of inclusion.

The current small group and online environment are working at our favor for promoting inclusion.

Because we are small, all the group activities, including break-out rooms are monitored by the organizing team. So, whenever, we find something wrong, we are able to detect them and rectify. If we become a larger entity, this might be a challenge. We can't expect that we always have a disciplined member, so we need to put our antennas up. Online is a closed environment, where behaviors violating inclusion will be pretty much obvious. If it happened behind the curtain, it is pity. We have never had such claim in the past, however, we will take appropriate measures to avoid such incident.  

Key customer is well-off individuals who are socially conscious and organizations that advocate the goal of our initiative or have interest in the ideas.

Key beneficiaries are the youths in the twenties all over the world.

Our platform will provide beneficiaries a place to exchange ideas, think creatively, and think aloud on social affairs.

Beneficiary value proposition is the ability to make better future for oneself and others. Customer value proposition is to promote development of youths, who will be the main working population in the years to come.

As of now, we are financially sustainable through donations and grants. Because the operation is voluntary, the cost is limited and can be covered by donation. We have been applying for grants and keep on doing so.

If we can improve our output, we may be able to sell our products or services in the long run.  

Unfortunately, we have not received any grants at all.