Regarding the obstacles faced by young activists

...Young activists face additional obstacles when they seek to make their voices heard. [Mary Lawlor, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders] identified intimidation and harassment in online spaces and the media, lack of adequate support from traditional allies, academic sanctions, and legal, administrative, and practical barriers to participation in civic space as just some of the hurdles faced by child and youth activists. Despite these barriers, she notes, “Child and youth human rights defenders have been at the forefront of human rights movements and have achieved a significant impact, which should be acknowledged, celebrated and highlighted.”
From the report On Thin Ice: Disproportionate Responses to Climate Change Protesters in Democratic Countries. Climate Rights International. September 2024.

Museum of Solution wins international Hands On! Children In Museums Award

Montage of program posters from the Museum of Solutions.

My former home, The Museum of Solutions, Mumbai (MuSo) has won the prestigious international Hands On! Children in Museums Award for 2024.

Congratulations to the MuSo team; founder Tanvi Jindal, the JSW Foundation and supporters — and the extraordinary community of young people MuSo is privileged to serve. <3

The Hands On! award has been given annually since 2011 by the European Museum Academy and the Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums to recognize excellence and innovation in children's museums "through interactive exhibits, educational programs, or inclusive design...that inspire curiosity, learning, and a sense of wonder in young minds."

In bestowing this award, the judges wrote — quite poignantly,

“The different zones on each floor address issues and ideas that are contemporary, bold and emotional. MuSo is not just about exhibits, it is about unlocking the potential within every child to change the world, using exhibitions, educational activities and public programmes to promote learning, enjoyment, reflection, creativity and knowledge. MuSo asks kids to put their ideas into practice, to make projects, finding strategies and solutions, and to realise them.”

The citation continues,

"MuSo is revolutionary, but its ethos is a model for many other countries […] MuSo has a strong belief in the power of children and that children are the changemakers. The young visitors are encouraged and empowered to think for themselves and to find methods and solutions, looking to the future, to make a better world for their communities. The museum does exceptional work, thanks to its extraordinarily committed staff. In the long run, MuSo contributes to raising responsible members of society. Who else but a children’s museum can carry out this educational task in such a holistic way?"

I'm a bit overwhelmed by the judges' words! This feels like what MuSo set out to do so many years ago and yet it still seems bold and aspirational to me, full of challenges and unknowns as well as deep significance.

(I am remembering a story MuSo's Abhik Bhattacherji told me months ago when I was still in Mumbai. As I recall, he had asked an elderly woman in the museum's library — LiSo, the Library of Solutions — how she was enjoying her visit and she burst into tears. She told him that she had grown up in great poverty, and she never imagined that in her lifetime she would see her two young grandchildren happily reading books together in such a beautiful, joyous, purposeful space.

Almost every day brought a story like that, and almost every day brought a new glimpse of just how deeply significant and impactful [and necessary!] this new kind of museum can be. Let's have many more of them. Young people, and our collective future, deserve no less.)

//
Cross posted on LinkedIn

Leaving Mumbai

After 4 years on the project and a year as Director I’ve packed my bags and said goodbye, for now, to my fabulous friends, colleagues and community at the Museum of Solutions (MuSo), Mumbai. Thank you! I am overwhelmed by your kindness and generosity and I’ve learned more from you than you’ll ever know!

It was a privilege to help nurture this new museum and its library (LiSo, the Library of Solutions) from concept to reality; to help build and lead the founding team; and to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to our new state-of-the-art building — “a world-class space to champion the art of finding solutions,” as a reviewer at Condé Nast Traveler recently put it — unique in Mumbai and India, if not the world.

Four years ago Tanvi Jindal, MuSo’s founder, asked if I would help her think about a new “museum of solutions” she was envisioning for the site of an old industrial building in the middle of Mumbai.

How could we create a new kind of museum in one of the world’s largest and most challenging cities to catalyze action for the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, foster new approaches to education, and help young people make meaningful change in the world together?

…And could we also make it fun?

Though Mumbai and India were new to me, this question of museums, play, and civic impact was not. Through years of work with the Smithsonian Institution, the U.N., and other cultural and civil-society conveners around the world I’ve been part of a decades-long movement to *flip the script* on traditional museum practice and help people use their own cultural institutions as platforms for the public good.

And this moment demands nothing less.

With a population of 22 million, Mumbai is indicative of the world’s 40+ megacities (cities with over 10 million inhabitants). Along with megacities like Shanghai, Jakarta, Paris, and L.A., Mumbai is home to daunting social and environmental problems — as well as astonishing creativity and drive. But the problems and the vitality often seem to live in different worlds.

Mumbai is India’s financial capital but over half of its residents live in slums. It is India’s innovation and creative hub (Bollywood! The city of dreams!) but many of its neighborhoods will be underwater by midcentury, drowned by rising seas due to climate change. Education is highly valued, but it is predominantly structured around rote memorization and test achievement, not the world as we see it today.

Young people are often caught in the middle of this dynamic, squeezed between a daily fight for survival, antiquated educational and social systems, and their own profound abilities to see and create a future filled with beautiful change.

Furthermore, young people — all people — have a fundamental human right to be involved in the decisions that will affect their futures, but too few conveners will help them find their way.

If we can learn to solve problems in places like Mumbai we stand a good chance of surviving and thriving in the 21st century. Museums like MuSo can be a kind of civic infrastructure in this regard. By being bold, inclusive, and action-oriented — rooted in reality but also participatory and fun — we can bring people together to build social capital and elevate everyone’s ability to imagine and build a future that is joyous, sustainable, and just.

What’s next for me? I don’t know — I’m still catching up on sleep and processing what I’ve learned! But with any luck, I’ll keep working in this direction: young people and their grownups in vital civic spaces, enthralled by the chance to play and explore together — making life better one small solution at a time.

//

This text is a slightly expanded version of this post on LinkedIn.

We have been working with amazing young people here in Hawai'i. [...] The young people today, they are determined. They understand what's happening to their planet, and they are committed to advocating for a better future for them and generations to come.
Julia Olson, as quoted in Young climate activists just won a ‘historic’ settlement by Victoria Bisset, Washington Post. June 28, 2024. I've ligtly edited/shortened Olson's quote.
Olson is the co-executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children's Trust, which has been representing young people in lawsuits claiming that government inaction (or worse) has violated young people's right to a clean environment. The article outlines a “historic” settlement between youth activists and the state of Hawai'i that requires the state to “cut its transportation sector’s planet-warming pollution and to consult with young people about its climate impact.”
Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:
  • Clean a fish and dress a chicken
  • Write a business letter
  • Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord
  • Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes
  • Handle a boat safely and competently
  • Save someone fron drowning using available equipment
  • Read at a tenth grade level
  • Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy
  • Dance with any age
The list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.
The Long Ride: The surf legend Jock Suthrerland's unlikely life, by William Finnegan. The New Yorker, June 10, 2024. Audrey is Jock Sutherland's mother. She raised her children — all “water babies” — on the coast of Oahu, Hawai'i in the 1950s and 60s.

The moral test of a society

It is time to put a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. […]

Last fall, I gathered with students to talk about mental health and loneliness. As often happens in such gatherings, they raised the issue of social media.

After they talked about what they liked about social media — a way to stay in touch with old friends, find communities of shared interests and express themselves creatively — a young woman named Tina raised her hand. “I just don’t feel good when I use social media,” she said softly, a hint of embarrassment in her voice. One by one, they spoke about their experiences with social media: the endless comparison with other people that shredded their self-esteem, the feeling of being addicted and unable to set limits and the difficulty having real conversations on platforms that too often fostered outrage and bullying. There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it. […]

The moral test of any society is how well it protect its children. Students like Tina and mothers like Lori do not want to be told that change takes time, that the issue is too complicated or that the status quo is too hard to alter.

One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency you don't have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.

Surgeon General: Why I'm Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms, by Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States. New York Times, 17 June 2024
“My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know.”
11-year-old Naomi Wadler, as quoted in Students lead huge rallies for gun control across the U.S. by Michael E. Shear. New York Times, 24 March 2018. Her complete statement was, “People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own. People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It’s not true. My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know.”

Group selfie, Codeavor India National Event. 6 April 2023. CC-BY

I was lucky enough to be the “guest of honor” and keynote speaker at the 2024 Codeavor India National Event in Delhi. Codeavor is a kind of international hackathon and science fair with over 300,000 kids from 70+ countries using robotics, AI, and design thinking to develop their own solutions to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

I was there representing the Museum of Solutions and there was a line of kids wanting my autograph [!!] and/or a selfie, so we decided to try a group selfie to save some time. :) :)

To the right of the frame with a big smile on his face is Dr. Sreejit Chakrabarty, Director of AI at GEMS Education in Dubai — a brilliant guy and fun to be with!

42 billion times

kidsTimes-youTube.JPG
Why was YouTube Fined?

[T]he Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general said that YouTube broke [the] law by collecting [COPPA-prohibited personal details] from children who watched kids' videos on the site — and then earned millions of dollars by using that data to target kids with ads.

Did YouTube know that the data it was collecting belonged to kids?

Yes […] YouTube told one advertising company that video channels on its site … did not have viewers under 13. But at the same time YouTube was promoting itself as the top online destination for kids … Some of YouTube's most-viewed channels are aimed at children — the videos on one channel, Cocomelon Nursey Rhymes, have been viewed more than 42 billion times.
YouTube’s Privacy Problem, by Natasha Singer, in the New York Times “Kids” section (print only), 12 November 2019

In Defense of Gerontocracy?

I have come to see the moral clarity and conviction of young people and the wisdom and pragmatism of the old not as adversarial forces but as two elements in a dynamic system that need to be designed for as parts of a whole.

Here are two reactions to Frank Bruni’s column In Defense of the Gerontocracy: Maybe older is better. Just look at Nancy Pelosi, about US Senator Dianne Feinstein [age 85] apparently scolding of a group of young constituents who pressed her for action on the Green New Deal. The two comments below, from Micah and Paul B., are not directly responding to each other’s posts, but the effect is the same.

From Micah in NYC,

I usually love Frank Bruni’s columns, but this one infuriates me. Sure, yes, there are good Boomers. Fine. But, fundamentally, that’s not what the Feinstein kerfluffle was about. It was about a powerful woman condescending to terrified children who will inherit an Earth rendered uninhabitable by her brutal timidity long after she is dead. I am 23; if we don’t act now to demolish the structures that enable climate change, our planet will be in catastrophe long before I am Dianne Feinstein’s age, or Frank Bruni’s. Acknowledging that is far, far more important than a fragile generation’s ego.
Micah, NYC, 26 February 2019

From Paul B. in New Jersey,

You miss the whole concept of this essay. Ms. Feinstein was not dismissive of the children’s concerns; anything but. What she was saying is that large problems deserve passionate attention but also deep thought and planning. The devil is indeed in the details. The passionate intensity of youth insists upon immediate solutions without thinking deeply on the nature of the problem and the construction of complex solutions, essentially saying, “wouldn’t it be great if... or it is terrible that...” It is only through life long painful experience that anything remotely resembling wisdom is gained and one possesses it only at the apex of life and only briefly. Even though passion may seem to have dimmed, commitment remains. You would do well to listen to the elders while you can, rather than charge into what you know little about. Decent manners would not hurt, either.
Paul B, New Jersey, 26 February 2019

While I do see these two views as connected parts of a whole I will place my bets with Micah — with the the young and the young at heart. At this moment in history, with the ticking bomb of climate change, there is simply not enough time to rely on the slow, wise processes of the past.

As Bill McKibben wrote in Rolling Stone, “If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win.” Or as Alex Steffen has said, “Winning slowly is same as losing.”

Addendum

In the article If Americans Can Find North Korea on a Map, They’re More Likely to Prefer Diplomacy (New York Times, 5 July 2017) Kevin Quealy unpacks several studies that show that when people know more about the geographic location of geopolitical hotspots — when they know where North Korea and the Ukraine are, for example — they tend to favor diplomacy over military engagement.

The people who had the most geographical knowledge were, by-and-large, highly educated, but the next most knowledgeable group was…older people.

“Nearly half of respondents 65 and older found North Korea. The Korean War, which ended in 1953, may be in the memory of today’s older seniors,” wrote Quealy.

From these studies it might be fair to conclude that the lived experience of older people may give them quantifiably different starting points for decision making than the young — which seems uncontroversial when I put it that way, but given Americans’ general state of ignorance regarding geography and history I would want more people in the proverbial “room where decisions are made” who had a living, working knowledge of where things are and what happened there in the past, than not.

"Professionals are often incapable of independent thought"

“By the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were growing. He had glimpsed the essential truth of the market: that even people who called themselves professionals are often incapable of independent thought…”
— From Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities, by Michael Lewis, New York Times, 2001

This quote, this assertion in this context, hit me like a lightning bolt 11 years ago and has rung in my head ever since.

Michael Lewis’s article, written for the Sunday Times Magazine, brilliantly teases out the excruciating ironies — the abject conflict — between new and old ways of thinking about expertise and authority. 

It is a story about about a boy from New Jersey who figures out that he is just as capable, in fact more capable, than established professionals at analyzing stocks. He makes about $800,000 in 6 months of trading, and as a result he is prosecuted by officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission who are both mystified by his very existence — and threatened by his implicit challenge to The Way Things Are Done (which, we have learned throughout a decade of financial crisis, is often a nonsensical house of cards).

Eventually, the Bloomberg News Service commissioned a study to explore the phenomenon of what were now being called ‘whisper numbers’. The study showed the whisper numbers, the numbers put out by the amateur Web sites, were mistaken, on average, by 21 percent. The professional Wall Street forecasts were mistaken, on average, by 44 percent. The reason the amateurs now held the balance of power in the market was that they were, on average, more than twice as accurate as the pros – this in spite of the fact that the entire financial system was rigged in favor of the pros. The big companies spoon-fed their scoops directly to the pros; the amateurs were flying by radar

[…]

It occurred to no one that the public might one day be as sophisticated in these matters as financial professionals.

[…]

Even a 14-year-old boy could see how it all worked, why some guy working for free out of his basement in Jackson, Mo., was more reliable than the most highly paid analyst on Wall Street. The companies that financial pros were paid to analyze were also the financial pros ‘biggest customers’. A year later, when the Internet bubble burst, the hollowness of the pros only became clearer.

[…] 

“At length, I phoned the Philadelphia office of the S.E.C., where I reached one of the investigators who had brought Jonathan Lebed to book. I was maybe the 50th journalist he’d spoken with that day, and apparently a lot of the others had had trouble grasping the finer points of securities law. At any rate, by the time I asked him to explain to me what, exactly, was wrong with broadcasting one’s private opinion of a stock on the Internet, he was in no mood.

‘Tell me about the kid.’

‘He’s a little jerk.’

‘How so?’

'He is exactly what you or I hope our kids never turn out to be.’

‘Have you met him?’

‘No. I don’t need to.’

No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds

“If you believe, as I do, that many of those [newspaper publishing] institutions are so mismatched to the task at hand that most of them face a choice, at best, between radical restructure and outright collapse, well, in that case, you’d probably find the smartest 25 year olds you know, and try to convince them that now would be a pretty good time to start working on Plan B… No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.”
— Clay Shirky, Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis, December 2, 2011