To recap, we were saying that your role, and as a youth ambassador from the UN to the UK, and also how to use integration instead of a separate track is becoming the norm, or at least in the UN a norm.
(laughter)
But then internationally as well. When we run the Asia-Pacific Social Enterprise Summit, we made sure that we learned from this recommendation so that instead of having a separate youth track as these summits often do, we just fully integrate in each panel, at least a youth speaker in that time frame.
I think that’s really interesting, and I think you say Savinda Ranathunga, also a regional youth coordinator UNDP in Asia-Pacific that coordinates the impact of work over this region. I think he also really liked this new design.
I think the British Council is repeating this design in in SEWF in Addis Ababa, for the Social Enterprise World Forum. I’m very happy this has become the new norm.
Yeah, it’s so great, and it really makes a difference. In order to have a youth member on all panels, you really need to change the organizational ethos as well, to make it more accessible to youth.
Something we’ve noticed now is that when you do have a youth member on a panel, the whole language changes and people use simpler language, and it’s exactly the same word but it’s just more understandable so that people aren’t googling what this word means, or searching on this an acronym or…
That’s right, exactly.
It makes a huge difference, and it makes it more accessible for other people watching online, and things like that, too. It’s in every way possible, that’s the best thing that you could have done.
Indeed. It’s not just transparency, it’s exclusive transparency, because we can be very transparent but speak in lots of acronyms. That kind of transparency doesn’t mean much.
Exactly.
(laughter)
It’s about accessibility as well.
Exactly. Really happy that you’re in Taiwan. Are there particular thoughts or agenda that I can help you amplify?
As the UN system have signaled by surrounding the sustainable goals with the color of the 13th, saying that climate action actually, if we don’t get this right, all our work and the other 16 goals will be canceled or partially reverted.
Which is why we chose these colors, climate and ocean – Taiwan is an island after all – as our main color for this year’s UNGA participation. That will continue for the rest of the year. You will see this logo everywhere.
Life Under Water and Climate Action. That’s going to be our two focus going into the UNGA and for the rest of the year. Are there any particular thoughts or actions that I can help you amplify?
Yeah. Because of my background in health, from my experience, I’ve also seen at the UN, ECOSOC, where I was the only person there representing the health perspective of these issues, like climate change impacts health. I was the only one advocating for that and speaking for that, particularly as a youth member.
It’s in the back. It’s in the background. It’s not really mentioned. Often, the conversation is very directed towards building resilience into the infrastructure and building resilience in government systems.
Actually, we don’t really think about building resilience into the communities and building from a bottom-up approach as well. It’s just things which are often forgotten, which it’s worth mentioning. I think it would be really appreciated.
Climate resilience.
In public health?
Yeah. In public health and communities. One way to achieve that is through health, but also, other ways would just be through building a more integrative community system and having local…I know you don’t have national reviews…
We do. They’re voluntary. They can’t stop us.
(laughter)
Yeah. Taiwan does a very good job.
In the same system, we’re developing a local national review, so really empowering communities as well for the climate agenda.
You’ll be happy to learn that the capital city, Taipei City, and the ring city that surrounds the capital city, the New Taipei City…
New Taipei City.
…as well as our airport city, Taoyuan City, they are all making their voluntary local reviews, with a much more solid focus on the community level. On the policy level, like carbon reduction or whatever, is reaching our national review anyway.
They don’t have to repeat those items. They’re now all looking to a community level. I’m in touch with a lot of the VLR teams.
I think VLR really want to make a difference, just like when New York started this movement. They want to say that they’re making “much better progress” than the national progress. [laughs] Public health is definitely one of the directions I can talk to them about.
The team with me to the UNGA, which are winners of our annual Presidential Hackathon. We reward the trisectoral collaboration, give out five trophies. They prototype for three months. The five winning teams out of a hundred or so get a presidential award.
There’s no money. There’s just a projector that, when turned on, shows the president’s will, the president handing the award to the team. If you’re a public servant, it’s very useful because if your director general say there’s no money, they just turn on the projector, and there is budget.
(laughter)
If your administrator…
That’s right. If your minister or deputy minister says, “It requires cross-ministerial communications. It’s too complex,” just turn on the projector, and they’ll say, “OK, I’ll talk to that minister tomorrow.”
(laughter)
It carries the presidential promise that, whatever they prototype in the past three months, we will make it happen in a year and into the official public budget and policy, no matter which personnel, regulatory, or budget adjustment to make. It’s around three different departments from the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
Also, Interior. Their main focus, the two winning teams that got a presidential promise, corresponds to your idea of community-based health care. One focusing on the elderly, which is the most vulnerable, and one focus on the ones that preferred to have hospice at home rather than hospital.
For cancer patients, I think 80 percent of people prefer to stay at home. At the moment in Taiwan, unfortunately, 80 percent of people end up spending time in hospital at the end. There’s a disconnect, and it’s mostly about community support. If they feel isolated, of course, hospital is the place to go.
If their family feel that the community takes care of them with psychological 2and communal help, then it’s far more likely that they will be able to stay at home. The second one is not quite climate change, but it enables the same community resilience structure that you were just referring to. We’ll be happy to amplify those ideas.
That’s fantastic. This whole project is really commendable. It’s a great way to encourage communities to think of other innovative ideas as well.
That’s right.
That’s the other point I was going to say. Innovation is so important, especially for climate change. The youth are so great at that. With that interdisciplinary collaboration, it will be propagating that innovation a lot quicker. I’m glad that you’re already on top of that as well. [laughs]
We just wrote out a new K-12 curriculum, which I helped design this month. Instead of teaching any particular disciplines, it takes a cross-disciplinary way of teaching that solves real social problems. The curriculum change is very tangible. In the previous one, which is typically East Asian, you can imagine memorization and rote thing.
It’s the same…
As a junior-high dropout, I actually don’t have some experience about that, but I hear my colleagues say…
(laughter)
…that they have to pass something like a entry exam. I don’t know what that means.
(laughter)
For example, there were a student that feel excluded from the class because their mathematics, for example, is in the lower 10 percent and is suffering a lot of self-image or dignity issues because of the “low achievement.”
After the new curriculum and the liberty of introducing SDG-based teaching material, it’s literally, you’re the president. There’s sea waste. There’s climate change. If you don’t design a better zero-waste, zero-carbon, zero-plastic ecosystem in this many years, like 30 years or so, this will happen. It’s your role to stop that.
Because the child is maybe 13 or something like that, 30 years down the road, that’s when they are running the country actually.
(laughter)
If we don’t solve things now, they bear the consequences. That student – we just had a symposium yesterday – just drew a deck of 20 pages, outlining the entire cradle-to-cradle system, and used their phones, and so on, to look up all the possible solutions, and things like that, and then become kind of a top achiever.
The teacher said that this must be a gifted student. Their parents was like, “No.” [laughs] “It was not like that.” Having a real case that they can envision in 30 years, I think that really motivates a lot of our young people.
That’s really great, because there’s so much more to education than just to rote learning. Especially because, like you said, medicine is very, very didactic, and there’s only a limited number of things you can learn and everyone has the same textbook.
As soon as I went and took a year out into business and management, we did an entrepreneurship module, and I’ve never thought creatively like that before. It opened my eyes to what there is out there. [laughs]
Using that difference in education systems. It’s so difficult to change curriculum, and curriculum development as well, because I’ve been involved in that…
I was trying to integrate social accountability into the medical curriculum. Anything in medicine or any curriculum change takes huge, huge efforts, and you need everyone behind you. You need friends in the top, basically. [laughs]
That is true. This one took us 10 years.
(laughter)
Exactly. It’s very difficult, but once you have that, it’s really easy to scale up. If you start it in one school, it’s so easy to do the same, because you have that evidence base and how successful it’s worked. It’s really great.
What’s your take on the debate amongst Taiwanese youth on climate change, in particular? We were talking a little bit in the car on the way here about pollution, and that’s obviously a tangible thing that people think about, but how do you see, generally, the youth’s view on climate change and the risk around it?
In Taiwan, since we’re a larger Pacific [inaudible 12:42] island, it’s not felt as acute as some of the Pacific islanders. Because we share, at least on the east side, the same Austronesian lineage and culture with fellow Pacific islanders, so people do feel empathy, and feel a kinship around that.
People on the west side, which is more Western, [laughs] is, I think, mainly, as you said, air and water pollution is felt by everybody. Sometimes it’s beyond our control. It’s international, right? Like the swine virus flu thing.
African Swine Flu, yeah.
It’s beyond our control. Food safety, from a recent social issue survey by NARLabs , it is the top, out of 100 topics that people cares about. Anything that impacts your safety, which, of course, includes pollution is on top of everybody’s agenda.
That is, I think, where we are at moment. Social accountability using distributive ledgers, using Internet of beings and other technologies to ensure a safe cradle-to-cradle delivery, the air boxes, the water boxes, the various IoT contributions we have to the word, they are all very popular subjects.
They don’t require public funding. People care about it so much that the social sector just gathered the funding and crowdfund those issues themselves. That’s the general care about the environment. They have a much higher social legitimacy than economic development.
You don’t find it in other highly developed jurisdictions near here. Here, the environmental protection, I think we’re second only to New Zealand in that kind of comparison.
The second thing is the plastic waste. Again, because people who are my age or younger than my age, have a habit to recycle and to sort the waste. It’s very easy to introduce this additional idea that plastic pollution to the sea, it doesn’t only affect the food chain, but actually is a symptom to a bad resource management framework.
Which means that if we do this right, it gives us additional leverage to innovate on climate change mitigation. If we can’t even take care of our plastic, then we’re actually very limited in the leverage. Because that means the environmental, echo design, and other sectors are not closely working together.
Our e-petition to gradually ban plastic straws was raised two years ago by a 16-year-old girl. Our e-petition allows for pseudonyms, so at the beginning, we didn’t know who this person is. It’s just they get 5,000 signatures in no time. It must be from the environmental minister. It must be a very seasoned social activist…
(laughter)
…for environmental justice.
It turns out, she’s 16 years old, and her civics teacher just showed them this platform. She thought, “Ah, I can find a thing that resonates with people.”
That’s the pattern we see around Taiwan is that the 16- or 17-years-olds and the 60- or 70-years-olds, these are the two main age groups caring a lot about sustainability and organize very successfully online. First, they have more time on their hands, I’m sure.
(laughter)
Also, they think less about private, benefit, right, and more about public benefit, by nature. They work really closely together and successfully. We’re now already ban, actually, indoor plastic straw use and take out plastic straw use will be banned shortly afterwards in due time.
Sugarcane and there’s like seven different kind of zero or negative-carbon pipelines to make those new straws. That becomes a kind of new economic…
Since I’ve been here, you now have to pay for plastic bags, which is similar in the UK. That’s made a big impact, I think.
Now, straws…
I’m noticing, yeah.
At least you can re-use the plastic bags as garbage bags. They enter into the circulation. But the plastic straws, nobody actually donate it back…
It goes into the ocean.
Right.
Exactly.
For indoor drinking of our national identity drink, bubble tea…
(laughter)
…as well as other drinks, it’s now banned. Paper, which is the default fallback, also has its own issues, environmentally, and also it just doesn’t taste as great. People are actively looking at sugarcane and all sorts of other circular design elements from the farming process, agricultural byproducts, and make straws out of that.
There are some plants that are naturally straws. That’s where the name came from, right?
(laughter)
Original straws.
Back full circle.
Exactly.
(laughter)
Reverting to actual straws and things like that, and just to harden them so they don’t dissolve in the midst of a bubble tea. That’s a very new innovation sector, and it’s really booming. We arrange a collaborative meeting between the petitioner as well as the people making those plastic utensils.
They said they entered the business 30 years ago when they were young as social entrepreneurs. At that time, hepatitis B is very prevalent in Taiwan. They made those plastic alternatives to the reusable utensil exactly because of community healthcare. Now, hep B is gone. Just take a pill, it’s gone.
Their social purpose has dwindled. As long as there’s sufficient supply and new material, they’re very much willing to enter into this new realm of social purpose. What we thought as a fight, actually ends up with a very thorough design.
The petitioner just got a scholarship from one of those banks for her work, which is great. If we don’t meet her, if we don’t arrange this cross-sectoral meeting, maybe she just go to strike on Fridays. What happens after that, we don’t know.
(laughter)
Very interesting. In the British office, we’ve introduced a plastic-free policy. We’ve banned all single-use plastics. We’re trying to do this in all our missions around the world and in the foreign office in London by 2020.
That’s excellent.
Little things, like you used to walk around the foreign office in London, and everyone had the Starbucks-style coffee cup. In this part of the world, people were always good at using the flasks for hot water. There’s a long way to go still in the UK as well as here in terms of plastic use.
Changing norms is always harder for more senior people.
That’s why youth engagement is important.
Exactly.
Right.
[laughs] Our National Youth Council is literally one minister each. They can recommend one young person to reverse mentor them. Then those people form the National Youth Council, headed by the Premier himself. Their decisions are made into policy by the Premier if it makes sense. It’s a really good integration strategy.
How often does that meet, the National Youth Council?
Every youth councilor, 35 of them, can convene a local meeting to tackle a specific local issue. The last one we did was all of us went into the clam farm, just picking some clams, and to do low-density, no-underground-water-drawing, using natural seawater to do salinity regulation, zero-carbon, self-made energy using solar panels, sustainable farming of clams.
Which, as a vegetarian, I eat clams because they don’t suffer.
(laughter)
In any case, that was the experience we collectively had. They can have that every other week if they want. In reality, it’s more like every month or so. We travel to a local place to walk with the community, talk with the community.
As the youth councilor that directs this meeting, they get a chance to call all the relevant ministries, like of agriculture, of energy, economic affairs, and so on in Taipei and then we do a telepresence.
In Taiwan, we say when we meet face-to-face, we build 30 percent of trust. Because Taiwan has broadband as human right, across high-definition video, maybe 20 percent of trust. Then they can see the actual policymakers. The policymaker get to see where the community really is instead of as abstract write-ups. Or, statistics, that’s worse. [laughs]
Then we make policy innovations together, every month or so. Then the result of those synthetic documents become their official proposal to the premier. I run a feasibility meeting. It’s two-months for this kind of pre-meeting, and then another two months, the premier’s office responds.
For example, our winners in the International World Skills – like Olympics for skilled workers – get to join the National Day Parade just like the Olympic athletes are. That’s a youth councilor proposal. He is the reverse mentor for the minister of labor. It’s to raise the visibility of skills as a first choice, not second choice, for higher education.
That sort of proposal, the premier says, “It’s fine.” Then it’s policy. That’s the sequence. The official meeting is every four months, but every two months between those, we run feasibility meetings so the premier just has to say yes.
I doubt we have such a direct system in the…
I was going to say it’s so hard to match community and researchers and get that into policy. There’s a huge gap between community and actual policy. The time it takes to get from here to here, it’s too long. By that time, the community is changing. The world is dynamic.
Exactly, which is why I have weekly office hours…
That’s fantastic.
…and the bi-weekly tours on social innovation. If you’re interested in that model of governance, I’ve written about it. I’ll be happy to share.
100 percent I would love to read that.
How regularly do you do your open sessions where…
Office hours.
Once a week, and people come and…
Once a week.
Every Wednesday.
Literally, every Wednesday, and in my real office. This is my real office…
Oh, wow. [laughs] That’s so fun.
…the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab. The place itself is co-designed around Taiwan with 100 social innovators. The public art here is contributed by people with Down syndrome. We saw them as vulnerable population, but actually they see the world through geometry or topology, not like us through text or numbers.
When they draw the world they see, it’s like Mangold. You get inspired. It flips the thought around these contributors so that they become contributors. They’re not “vulnerable people.” The design is all like this. Every Wednesday, you can bring your pet self-driving tricycles [laughs] and meet me.
People just bring their ideas and their visions and then discuss them?
Yeah, their pets. There’s a one-in-twenty chance that people bring their perpetual motion machine.
(laughter)
The only thing I ask is that it has to be radically transparent so that everybody learns from our exchange. People did learn, and they just modified those self-driving tricycles into things that actually make sense for the elderly to help them, like in a shopping cart that follows them.
You can put things into it. Once it’s full, it summons another one, and things like that. It’s social design right there. People who live in the western part, because of high-speed rails, they take full advantage of my office hour from 10 to 10 every Wednesday.
People on the eastern, on the indigenous, on the rural, on the off-shore islands, it’s a higher time cost for them to meet me for 40 minutes in Taipei. Which is why I travel every other Tuesday to those places and bring technology to people rather than asking people to come to technology. That’s the design for doing that.
That’s really great. You’ve literally thought of…
…including everyone who is often forgotten. Especially in these climate change debates, there’s always these people who are disenfranchised, marginalized groups…
Very much so.
…who aren’t contributing to the policy or any of the community discussions even. You see the people making the policies aren’t really representative of the public who will be really affected by the policies.
That’s right.
Through this, you’re really getting every single person’s input. Do you have anything online for people to contribute?
Yes. Once the local people set the agenda, we have a AI-powered conversation engine which we’re using right now to discuss not just US-Taiwan diplomatic relationship, but also, domestically, about how to improve our hiking experience so we can balance the need for people who like mountains, like Councilor Yeh here…
(laughter)
…and people who care about ecological sustainability. They’d have to find their common values.
In each of those sub-topics, this one was about self-driving vehicles. You see a fellow sentiment from a citizen. It’s what we call focused-conversation method. First, we crowdsource the facts, the data. Sharing the data, we ask people how they feel.
That’s often what’s lacking in public consultation. We jump straight from facts to suggestions, but we don’t ask about people’s feelings. The people get more polarized as they see each other’s ideas. Only the most divisive ones get any airtime… I’m not going to talk about referendums.
(laughter)
In this sense, we have three weeks dedicated for feelings so people can share what they feel is important agenda-setting. They see that, as they click agree or disagree on each other’s sentiments, they move on this visualization toward people who feel like them. You can see the consensus in different groups. You can see groups form and so on.
There’s no reply button because if there is a reply button, the people with the most time wins. There’s no reply button, so you can’t attack anyone for their opinion. You can just propose a better one.
Every time after we run a pol.is conversation, we see the same…This is all machine-generated report. There’s actually one five points of difference, often ideological. Most people agree on most of the things most of the time. It’s just that the media, institutional or social, only focus on those five things.
These things are new. They’re innovative. They’re not yet government policy. They’re not yet norms. The private sector isn’t endorsing that for the fear that they may cause backlash. We can show, conclusively, everybody think it’s a good idea. Why don’t we just ratify this and table the discussion later about ideologies? Right.
(laughter)
We need these in the high-level events where there’s so many discussions going on. Often, you get the same conclusion, but in order to get that conclusion, you had so many great ideas which, because they’re not physically agreed upon or no one’s really jumping onto the idea, then they’re not in the end policy, and you don’t see that.
That is one of the reasons why youth are disenfranchised by the whole policy and the whole process as well. Although they are voicing, they’re here, they don’t get to hear.
Exactly.
What’s the point of having a…
A discussion at all.
Exactly.
This is in conjunction with research by Nesta UK. Our facilitator for this discussion when the office was formed was from Policy Lab. She’s still working with us, but she’s back to London now and working with Indy Johar in the Dark Matter Lab.
They’re working, trying to transform, they call it the design government initiative, because if you introduce design thinking, it becomes immediately obvious that the young people, the people who are vulnerable and so on, are much better candidates in a cultural anthropological, or human geographical way to find the real needs to find how might we need, and the public service would deliver on these insights.
Because previously we only meet their representatives, which are not actually re-presenting their arguments, they’re presenting, but not really re-presenting. Then the “how might we” only focus on those represented subjects.
I’m going to attend the GDS-run design in government conference, their annual conference in Rotterdam, I think, November, just to talk about this.
Fantastic. You head to New York early next week, or the weekend?
Something like that, 24th.
You’re going to the climate summit, and doing other things around it as well?
Not just me. The presidential hackathon winners, which is the…
How many people are you taking along with you?
Ten-ish? Yeah, Ten-ish.
Two teams from the hackathons.
Right, but each one is going to bring… They are also inviting the academia?
Yeah, Professor Tung from National Yang-Ming University.
A professor, right. Then from our office, maybe three people, something like that. From MoFA maybe three more people.
I hope it goes well. UNGA always, I visited, I’ve been a couple of times in previous jobs, UNGA always a lot of fun, a lot of stuff going on.
It is. I really hope people can focus on the governance side, community governance side as well, because you can all the dashboard you want, but the innovations, you don’t see the innovations on the dashboards. That is where I really want innovation to come.
When people think innovation, they often think about “Oh, innovation, I know, it’s one of the SDGs, it’s SDG9, right?”
(laughter)
“It’s a byproduct of industrialization.”
(laughter)
Well, there are industrial innovations, but there are also social innovations.
(laughter)
It’s the social innovations we need to talk about. That’s my main platform during the UNGA.
Great.
That’s great. Are you going to be doing any speeches or anything like that?
I’ll look out for that. I’ll watch online.
Right. Last year I was also visiting during UNGA session, I had a collaborative session with one of also UN youth ambassadors, and it’s a really good experience.
Fantastic, yeah. I’ll look forward to that. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you very much.
Feel free to email me, any time really.
I’ll definitely contact you, yeah.
Great, thank you.
Thank you very much.
We should definitely get a photo.