Renjie Butalid

Opening Keynote, Global Young Leaders Conference
Washington, DC  - July 12, 2010

Check against delivery

Thank you very much for the kind introduction, I appreciate it.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, most especially to the delegates of the Global Young Leaders Conference. My name is Renjie Butalid and I am from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, a city that is home to one of the most famous and recognizable products in the world: the Blackberry smartphone produced by Canadian company Research In Motion. Now for my own curiosity, how many of you own a Blackberry? Well then, I actually own an Apple iPhone myself, but please don’t let that information leave this room, since I do have to go back to Waterloo after all.

It is my sincere pleasure to be with all of you here in Washington, DC this evening.

On a personal level, my presence on this stage is extremely humbling. You see, back in 2002, I was a 17-year old teenager who had just graduated from high school in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. That summer soon after finishing high school and before I went off to the University of Waterloo in Canada to eventually earn a degree in Economics and Political Science, I found myself here at the Global Young Leaders Conference as a delegate. At the opening keynote, we were in a room much similar to the one we are in now and I was in the audience surrounded by a group of exceptional young people from all over the world, just like all of you today. Many of the people I met back at the GYLC, I still call friends to this very day.

And just so everyone knows, when I was a delegate at the GYLC eight years ago, I was a delegate representing India. Where are the Team India delegates in the audience this evening? Namaste.

And I remember all I could think of when I sat quietly and reflected, after having traveled thousands of miles to get to this conference, which was also my first visit to the United States of America, was,

“What am I really doing here?”

“Am I really a leader?”

“I don’t even know what it takes to lead, let alone, know what it takes to be a ‘global young leader’.”

Now, if you find yourself asking these very same questions at this particular moment in time, I will let you in on a secret that has taken me a while to discover.

That it is OK to be scared and uncertain, not knowing what to expect and to not have all of the answers all the time. At times, it is ok to even question whether you have the capacity and makings of a leader. I know that I’ve certainly questioned myself in the past, especially when I was a highly involved student leader at the University of Waterloo, where at one point, I had the responsibility of overseeing a budget of over $1.2 million dollars on behalf of 24,000 undergraduate students when I was on student government. I’ve also questioned myself on numerous occasions, most recently as a community organizer involved with a number of local community events back in Waterloo. But I prevailed.

What I have learned throughout my own leadership experience is to let that feeling of self-doubt and uncertainty motivate me and I would encourage all of you to do the same; there is after all, only a very small difference between excitement and fear of uncertainty. Instead of being scared, tell yourself that you’re excited to be here and open yourself up to the possibilities that exist out there in the world. There is a reason why you are all here in Washington, DC and will be in New York City, attending this global conference on youth leadership over the next ten days. This is an opportunity of a lifetime and I really hope that you make the most of it.
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Having worked for Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo for close to two years now, and immersing myself deeply into the emerging field of ’social innovation’ and social change, I regularly come across many .pdf white papers, e-books, handbooks and reports on ‘how to change the world’, in a manner of speaking.

As you can imagine, these documents are piling up, currently tucked away in a folder labeled ‘Resource Documents’ on my laptop, and are calling out to be shared online. I didn’t have a way to share these documents in an effective manner, or at the very least, in an aesthetically pleasing manner – I suppose there is always Scribd or DocStoc, but both platforms still leave me with the feeling that I am reading a ‘document’ rather than a much more comfortable ‘book’.

In any case, I’ve come across this amazing online tool called issuu, that allows you to embed a .pdf document onto your blog/website – much like the Open Book of Social Innovation produced and published this month by NESTA in the UK, which I have embedded above – allowing readers to scroll through the document as they would a ‘regular’ book.

I suppose this is where an Apple iPad comes into play. I’ll be sharing the majority of the documents that I have accumulated over the past couple of years in the next little while, hopefully some of the documents and resources will prove useful to many of you who read my blog and follow me on Twitter.

As for the Open Book of Social Innovation produced by NESTA:

This volume – part of a series of methods and issues in social innovation – describes the hundreds of methods and tools for innovation being used across the world, as a first step to developing a knowledge base.

It is the result of a major collaboration between NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and the Young Foundation – two organisations that are committed to the role that social innovation can play in addressing some of the most pressing issues of our time.

The Open Book presents a varied, vibrant picture of social innovation in practice and demonstrates the vitality of this rapidly emerging economy. It is fantastically rich, and demonstrates the diversity of initiatives being led by entrepreneurs and campaigners, organisations and movements worldwide.

Together with the other volumes in this Series, we hope that this work provides a stronger foundation for social innovation based on the different experiences and insights of its pioneers.

Like the social ventures it describes, we want this work to grow and develop. Your comments, thoughts and stories are welcome at the project website: www.socialinnovator.info

Dr Michael Harris, NESTA

It is only the first week of the new year and I am already looking forward to what lies ahead! So many exciting events, projects and initiatives taking place in the near and not-so-distant future that I can tell that 2010 is going to be a transformative year.

That said, I will be speaking at the upcoming EpCon 2010 student technology conference to be held in Waterloo, Ontario next week on January 15-16, hosted by the up and coming student organization, EPIC Technology Organization founded at the University of Waterloo.

EPIC (which stands for Educate, Promote, Inspire & Connect) promises to bring together North America’s leading tech gurus and 300 student tech enthusiasts from schools all over Canada to imagine where the future of technology is headed. With tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, EA, Rogers, CISCO, RIM and IBM present at the conference, I am sincerely humbled to have been asked to deliver one of only three so-called ‘Power Talks‘ on a topic that I am extremely passionate about: social entrepreneurship, more specifically technology in social enterprise.

Given the context of the conference, I will be speaking on how an emerging generation of leaders and changemakers from all over the world, are harnessing the power of online and mobile technology to bring about significant positive social change, most especially to the world’s poor with limited or no access to such technology. Examples abound such as Kiva, where in just over four years, have managed to raise $100 million in the form of microloans for entrepreneurs in developing countries (and most recently, to entrepreneurs based in the US); to organizations such as Cell-Life and SIMpill in South Africa leveraging mobile SMS technology to revolutionize healthcare delivery for patients with HIV/AIDS and TB respectively.

These are only a few of the examples that I hope to showcase at EpCon 2010 next week. As I have said before and will say again, young people have the power and opportunities like never before to affect positive social change in this world, and this will become even more apparent in the decade to come.

If you are interested in attending EpCon 2010, there are still spaces available but you will have to register very soon in order to guarantee your spot. See you next week!

Posted via email from Renjie Butalid

Below is an interesting opinion editorial that appeared in the NY Times a couple of days ago, and it relates to some of the work that SiG@Waterloo is doing through the development of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI), being spearheaded by Thomas Homer-Dixon, Frances Westley and a number of other professors at the University of Waterloo.

Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation

In the coming decades, rapid systemic change on multiple levels will contribute to global problems, potentially inducing pandemics, violent meteorological events, and social and political unrest. The weakening of national public institutions, widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing scarcity of high-quality energy, and worsening damage to the global environment coupled with increased global connectivity will erode systemic resilience and boost the incidence of surprising and even catastrophic change.

The goals of the Waterloo Institute are to:

Develop a common, transdisciplinary language and methodology and an integrated, coherent theory for the study and pedagogy of complex adaptive systems; and, • Apply these tools to stimulate rapid and beneficial innovation that will increase the resilience of complex adaptive systems worldwide – including social, political, economic, and ecological systems – that are currently under threat.

If you are interested in finding out more about WICI, please check out the videos of all of the WICI Seminar Series, that began last September 2008. They are available here

End the University as We Know It

The world is certainly changing, and there seems to be a groundswell of people waking up and realizing that we need to change our mindset and the way we live/organize ourselves as a society (local, national, global), in order to adapt and become resilient as we face the challenges of the road ahead.

It seems that Mark Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, who penned the NY Times opinion editorial below, argues that our institutions of higher education and learning need to adapt to this changing world as well.

Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
Published: April 26, 2009

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities…. The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course – with no benefits – than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Read more here.

Mark Taylor then goes on to outline six ways in which these institutions of higher learning can change in order to become more adaptive to the complexities of the problems we face in the 21st century (summaries below):

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding to undergraduate programs, where the curriculum is like a web or complex adaptive network, where teaching and scholarship are cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

2. Get rid of permanent departments at universities, and instead, create problem-focused programs, such as a Water Program, where the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose very significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties in the coming future, as well as serious political and economic challenges. These programs will have a limited time-frame and will be constantly evaluated, resulting in the program being abolished, continued or significantly changed.

3. Encourage increased collaboration among institutions, leveraging the internet and online video-conference tools as a means of communication.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation of published “books” with more footnotes than text, and encourage graduate students to produce “theses” in alternative formats, using analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites, to films and video games.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students, exposing them to new approaches, different cultures as well as real-life considerations, helping them cultivate skills that will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure, and replace it with seven-year contracts, enabling colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

Posted via web from Renjie Butalid