It was supposed to have been written:
"Dear Sirs,
My name is João Felipe,
I am 13 and I want to change the world.
Can you help me?"
This was the first e-mail I wrote
when I was exactly 13.
I was full of ideas on how to change the world,
but whenever I tried to do something,
people would tell me I was too young to make a difference.
When I was little,
the first thing I learned was that there is no absolute truth.
I decided to use the Internet
to try to prove that I could make a difference.
I contacted around a hundred organizations,
national, international, large, small.
I sent this e-mail.
I was sure that,
as these organizations claimed in their websites
that working with the young was fundamental,
that my little e-mail would generate a movement
that would change the world.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way.
After months, I received only 5 replies.
Two of them said that
if I really wanted to contribute,
I should make a monthly donation to those organizations.
The other three said that what I wanted to do was incredible.
But I was really very young
to try and make a difference.
Needless to say I was very disillusioned
I even started to believe
that maybe the story my professors told me
about being too young to make a difference,
and that only grown-ups and educated people can do something,
was true perhaps.
Until one day, two years later,
someone came into my class
and put on a song by Charlie Brown Jr.,
"On TV, what they say about the young isn’t serious.
The young in Brazil are not taken seriously”.
This song was supposed to be an invitation
to participate in a project,
a kind of citizenship competition.
For me, this was a wake-up call.
I was sure that someone had written this song for me.
I couldn’t just do nothing.
So I took the opportunity,
this Project of the Aracati Institute,
a door had opened
and I couldn’t waste the opportunity.
Immediately,
I joined my friends at school
and we started an organization.
Our objective was simply to motivate other young people
so that they could also make a difference.
The strategy was very simple.
We went after young people
who were already doing incredible things in Brazil,
and we would say: “Come with us to some school
and tell your story."
There is even a picture of the first talk we promoted.
We brought Ísis from São Paulo.
She founded the Cala-Boca Já Morreu
when she was 8 years old.
Bringing such people to school
is transformative.People tell their stories
and you see in everyone’s eyes that they feel
"Yes! I can do it, too!"
There was so much change that when I was 16
I already knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I started to dedicate my life to telling these stories.
I discovered more and more young people
who were working on incredible projects.
However, for some reason,
these projects did not reach millions and millions of young people who,
like me, wanted to do something
and didn’t know where to start.
I realized that, because youth was something new,
nobody wanted to work with them,
we had several organizations,
but we just talked among ourselves.
I began to feel that we needed to open up this community.
Then, I decided to go to the media.
I started to go after teen magazines,
which, despite everyone’s indifference,
were the most efficient vehicle to reach the target audience.
I ended up in Capricho magazine.
That one in red over there is me.
Check out the model style.
However, because I was in Capricho,
most people frowned on it at the time,
many activists discriminated against me, made jokes
because Capricho is a girl’s magazine.
It was through the magazine that I managed to reach 180 thousand readers
in parts of Brazil I would never get to by myself.
After the first time I was featured in Capricho,
I was in high school,
I started to spend all my afternoons,
after school replying to e-mails.
I received over 300 e-mails a week
from young people who, just like me, wanted to do something
and had no clue where to start.
My job was to take these young people
and try to connect them to an organization or a project,
something that was happening in their regions.
And it was crazy.
Although we didn’t plan anything
we ended up creating a kind of network
totally informal, not very structured,
but it was a network that, at some point, started to collaborate.
Therefore, all those young boys who had just started their projects
or those who went to work for some organization,
began to contribute, and it generated results.
One of them, for instance,
was the inclusion of the young in the discussions around climate at the UN.
These pictures were taken in Argentina at the COP-10.
This informal network,
which had already crossed the Brazilian borders,
contributed enormously
to make sure that 28 young people attended it
that they participated in the climate negociations.
If you think that in 2004 there were people still saying
that there was no climate change,
you can imagine how they reacted
to the idea of having a group of young people sitting at the same table
to discuss the subject.
It wasn’t easy, but things have changed.
The last COP is proof of it,
it took place recently, last year, in Copenhagen,
where more than 2 thousand young people participated
both as representatives of their organizations
and as part of the official delegations.
They not only influenced the negotiations,
but also worked in the articulation of governments.
During the negotiations,
they scheduled a full day in the agenda
which was called “The Day of the Young and Future Generations”,
to discuss how we could contribute more.
Today I know that the work
I was doing in 2001 and 2002 was important.
However, at that time, nobody thought that what I was doing was work,
let alone that it would bear fruit.
I faced various challenges at school,
especially with my teachers
who insisted on the idea that what I was doing was a waste of time
and that I had to focus on the
college entrance examinations. I ended up yielding and took it.
I took the exam and went to college.
But 6 months later, studying International Relations,
I already knew that the time was coming
to make the most important decision of my life.
I dropped out of college.
and decided that I would try to spend 24h
doing what I believed in.
My excuse at the time was that I had gone to England.
I went to live in England and work for an organization
called Peace Child.
These are picture of the place where I lived.
young people lived in this house,
each one from a different country, and all of us working for the same organization.
You can image the mess
It was like a Big Brother with people coming from everywhere.
However, it was this change
that made my work professional
So, overnight, I had gone from being a cute young boy,
who wanted to do something,
to being a professional specialized in youth.
Since then, over the last five years, as I said,
I’ve worked in more than 400 projects,
together with the young, the government, organizations, companies.
There were 42 countries and in each one of them new stories,
new things that motivated us to move on even further.
In all this learning process,
I want to summarize my experience In a few lessons.
The first one is that we were using the wrong words,
the words I used in the beginning.
I worked for the protagonism of the young,
which is this idea of taking the young person
and making him/her the main character in the story.
The idea seems phenomenal, but it’s scary.
It frightens both the young and those not so young.
I’ve learned about the importance of speaking of empowerment.
We don’t want special treatment,
we want to be the same and work together.
We don’t want to work against anything.
This was one of the first lessons.
But for us to work together,
here comes the second lesson,
We must put an end to this story of taking it easy.
It’s not because I am young that you should take it easy on me.
It’s not because I am young
that I have an excuse to do anything.
We want responsibilities,
but we want to held responsible.
We want to play by the same rules.
This is the second lesson,
providing equal conditions and opportunities.
We often ask:
"Come on, why are the young not interested?”
If a young person wants to start his/her own company
and goes to a bank for a loan, he/she becomes a joke.
We have to make sure that we create equal means and opportunities,
and not be lenient and make things easier for the young,
but to make us the same so so that we can work together.
I think this is one of the most important lessons.
The final lesson is that we must assume the fact that we are young.
For instance...
the definition of youth varies from country to country.
Some people say that young people are Up to 24, 25, 29 years old
If we take the definition by Unesco,
which is from 15 to 24,
it’s the same definition we use here in Brazil.
How many of you know a young person up to 24
who is working in your team, your company today,
or even looking at the people here,
how many of you are less than 24?
Several people.
Currently, we find young people everywhere.
They are in companies, they are in governments,
They are in the media.
Yet, if we are so many and we are doing such cool things,
why do we have so much prejudice
and shame to accept who we are?
I think that, if we want to change this reality,
we must start motivating the young to tell their own stories.
We need more of these good examples.
Therefore, my challenge is that every young person needs to accept who they are
They must accept themselves and speak up:
"I am young! This is not a problem! This is not a defect.”
It may seem funny,
but to talk about youth today is a serious issue.
The young are not going to be young forever.
They grow, they become adults,
But the world problems are also getting bigger.
We don’t have time to sit around and wait.
If we talk about some countries,
if we take a country, for instance, in Asia or in Africa,
where the people under 25 represent,
sometimes, 60%-70% of the population,
we realize the importance of working with the youth.
If we have so many problems and we are looking for solutions
If we fail to get the young involved in this search
we are ignoring half of the world’s population.
This means half of our opportunities.
Take East Timor, a small country.
In East Timor, 48% of the population is under 15.
Two thirds of the population is under 25.
I think it’s clear that telling a young person
he is too young to make a difference should be a crime.
Nowadays,
we cannot afford to waste this resource
that these three billion young people all over the world represent.
We need to start learning how to collaborate.
Thank you.