Name: Want to Make a Change? Let Young People Tell Their Stories | Anshul Tewari | TED
Uploaded: 2025-10-09T14:43:22.000Z
Duration: 9 min 44 s
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Past simple

In 2008, when I was 17, I felt invisible and not like Harry Potter with an invisibility cloak.

I remember watching the news every single day with my parents.

And the more I saw it, the more I realized that I just couldn't relate with it.

The people didn't look like me, the issues didn't feel like mine.

And more than anything, young people's voices were nowhere to be found.

Now, I've grown up in a family where everybody cared deeply about what was happening in the world.

So naturally, we had a lot of conversation at home.

I had many opinions, many perspectives and experiences that I wanted to share with the world, but

My friends who I spoke with, my teachers who I spoke with, they all reminded me of the only thing that mattered, and

So I was extremely disappointed, very frustrated, and

the only thing that I knew and I loved was writing.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I just went online and I started writing, and

I forced my friends to read what I was saying.

My first story was actually about climate change.

And I remember asking a friend to read it, and

she went ahead and she commented on it, and the comment was a smiling emoji.

So I was disappointed because I wanted more.

I realized that, you know, a lot of us young people, we grew up in this culture of silence.

We are told, don't question, don't think critically, don't ask too much.

And that was something that really frustrated me.

I loved writing, like I said, So I thought that I'll do something interesting.

Young people, they want better jobs, they want to be skilled.

And by that time, by the way, I had about a thousand readers on the blog.

At least 30 people will apply for this program.

So I took those two and gave them the best that I had.

Every single day, I would train them on how to write better.

But what they were writing about was actually tough gender discrimination, climate change issues that we are not taught to talk about.

And something slowly began to shift in them.

The more they wrote, the more they began to question.

They started acting, they started wondering why things were the way they were.

And that motivated me to go school to school, college to college students, sticking up posters, asking more and more young people to join me.

Slowly and steadily, a community began to form.

And that blog became Youth Kiyawas, or Voice of the Youth.

Where Today more than 200,000 young people are writing on issues that are deeply underrepresented every single month.

And this was not just young people coming together and ranting.

This was young people coming together and telling stories that were not being told anywhere.

Ashwini was a medical student studying in the state of Rajasthan.

Every single summer break, he would go to the closest village and provide free medical services.

So he went to this village called Raj Ghat.

A couple of kilometers away from the the city of Jaipur in India.

And when he went there, what he found was far more than a medical crisis.

There was absolutely no clean drinking water.

And he realized that there were no schools at all.

And no weddings had taken place in the last 22 years.

Because nobody wanted to send their daughters to a village which was so impoverished.

But like I said, Ashwini saw this as more than just a medical crisis.

So he collaborated with us and he told the story of Rajgat on Youth Kiyawas.

It slowly and steadily began picking attention.

Thousands of people found out about Rajgat.

The first ever school was built in Rajgat as well.

Struggled her entire life to find accessible toilets.

Was read by more than a million people in less than a week.

That all the toilets at her workplace were reconstructed for her.

Raees talked about how there was a complete lack of menstrual hygiene awareness.

And his story sparked one of the largest menstrual hygiene awareness campaigns in Kashmir.

And for Pranay, his story led to the rescue of his father.

Who was stranded in Libya during the Arab Spring.

18,000 Indians were brought back to the country.

And what we realized was that we were really building individual agency.

We were enabling a muscle, the muscle of change making.