 Earlier I saw a guy who is smoothing out the wrinkles in that piece of the set and I thought, wow, that is detail right there. In much the same way, as they make it their business to be behind the scenes to fix these problems so that we don't even see their presence, I think, that is really kind of a metaphor for our role here today. We can be smoothing out the wrinkles in the set that is our world and its problems. And my specific area of focus is around young people as one myself. And I think that when we think of those two phrases, young people and problems, probably there's a whole bevy of issues that come to mind, whether it's something like the necessity for education reform or gang violence or youth unemployment. A recent Wall Street Journal headline placed it at almost 23%. Yeah, you can tell I'm the glass half empty kind of girl. But one of the biggest problems, not in reality, I actually read Peter DeManus' book Abundance and that definitely changed my mind. But one of the biggest problems isn't any one of these issues that you're seeing represented with the pictures up here, but rather this. The fact that we're generally seen as the sources of these problems as opposed to the sources for their solutions. Too often, the genuine story of youth falls by the wayside. We make up 18% of the world's population and in some developing nations we even make up a majority. Yet, we're often reduced to growth simplifications, to dichotomies. Any author ambitious enough to take on the task of writing the global story of youth would have to realize that this is oversimplifying. But in the story of the world's young people, I read plots that focus on our roles, either as these exploited victims who make for heart string tugging magazine covers or as the narcissists of the me generation slack to this and bystanders who are self obsessed. To be truly reflective of my generation, this story and its summation of us as characters has to change. I really came to this thought because of some reading that I did actually in my AP site class and we learned about a phenomenon called learned helplessness, which probably a lot of you are familiar with. Back in 1967, a psychologist named Martin Seligman, who was working with a bunch of dogs as test subjects at U Penn, found that the dogs would get trapped in a self discouraging mindset after they were subjected to adverse stimuli again and again and found that there was no way out. They simply gave up, even after the situation changed and it became clear that they did have an opportunity to escape the stimuli. I bring this up not because young people are lab animals, at least I hope not, but rather because we are used to an adverse stimuli of sorts. That is hearing no from day one, whether from teachers or parents, older siblings or other authority figures. We hear variations of you're too little for that. You're not smart enough to get that. You're not experienced enough to do that. All telling us, no, we aren't going to listen to you. And over time, just as repeated failed attempts to discourage those dogs in a study at U Penn, we fall into a disempowered mindset in which trying is no longer seen as useful. By confining our possible roles and solving the problems that plague us, not letting us change our story, society is teaching us helplessness. A first step to change that is to include us as authors of the story, by including us in meaningful public forums. I feel extraordinarily lucky to be here today, not just as one teenager, but one of two. Jack, do you want to stand up? Wave to everybody. So probably a lot of you know. And this is like one of the first times I've been at a conference like visioneering and I'm not the youngest person in the room. Actually wait, no I still am. But I think that it's extremely valuable to have actual young people in the room because a lot of times I'll see adults who are included as these token voices for youth. Well, you know what, we do have functioning vocal cords. And while I am extraordinarily grateful for the adults who do stand up for young people, I think that it's also very important to have a certain amount of age parity. We hear a lot of talk about gender parity about diversity and I think that we really need to make a strong movement toward including youth whether in boardrooms or in conferences or on stages. So back in 2010, I really began starting thinking about this when I came home from the TED conference where I'd been speaking, giving this talk called What Adults Can Learn From Kids, incidentally. And I realized that in the audience I was looking out on there were maybe only one or two people who were under 20, if that. I wanted to create a venue for the inclusion of youth that would have the same ability to give us the inclusion and a marketplace of ideas worth spreading that I'd seen at TED. And I really credit our sponsors that first year, some folks from Bing. I know that that's not a great word here with some Google folks in the room, but it definitely takes a lot of guts to hand over a gleaming conference center to a bunch of teenagers to basically run around and talk about ideas. It was extraordinarily ambitious, the fact that we wanted to do that and the fact that they agreed. We had a theme of power to the students and after a successful first year, we actually continued. Here are some images from our planning committee. We're starting up this year again in our fourth year. And last year, so Jack came and spoke, we had about 1,000 attendees. And I realized that the demand for the stories of young people was not just limited to our peers. It wasn't just teenagers wanting to hear other teenagers. We had parents and civic leaders and educators and change makers in the room who were adults who said, you know what, hearing young people's voices, this really does matter. This is giving me new ideas for how I look at my work and education. Tremendous demand exists for the authentic stories of young people. Beyond giving us the stage to change our story in methods like TEDx Redmond, is supporting us in changing the plot. That is solving the problems that so often dictate the stories you hear about our generation. I had the wonderful opportunity to meet a couple of people that I'm going to tell you about. The stories of Al-Hassan Umar, Dana Al-Madala, and Talia Lehman provide perfect examples. So Al-Hassan founded an organization out in Port Said, Egypt called Ebni Nafsak, Develop Yourself, after he witnessed the unrest of the Arab Spring and realized that many of the young people he knew were wondering what their future held for them. They didn't have many opportunities, jobs were limited, unrest was compromising the economy. So Ebni Nafsak focused on recruiting these active Egyptian youth who came from poor backgrounds and teaching them entrepreneurial skills so instead of being confined to the jobs that might have been available, they could go and create their own jobs. Al-Hassan is making a radical change throughout the youth in his country by giving them the opportunity to tackle their dreams through honing basic human development skills, math and economics, and learning other languages. And all of this helps address the high rate of youth unemployment and bring together creative ideas for a positive social change in the country as a whole. This is Dana Al-Madala. We were actually at a conference together and we started posing in face paint. Long story behind that, you can talk to me about that later. And Dana is just an absolute sweetheart, but more than that, she's also a firebrand and quite the rebel because when she was in ninth grade, she actually got expelled for standing up against what she saw as issues in her education, wrote learning, teachers who didn't care about students being creative and never gave them the chance to really make their voices heard. So what she then went and did after that was found an organization called One Hand, One Heart to give others, especially girls, who she saw as being confined in the conservative society, the ability to teach others, including orphans, sick children, and elderly literates, through the use of video broadcasts. Dana is showing many other girls that they can be successful and achieve what they want even within the confines of their society. And as someone who was interested in the intersection between neuroscience and computer science, she's mentored many groups of young people in developing scientific projects. And Talia started out as this girl in Iowa who is fundraising post-hurricane Katrina. Several million dollars in TV interviews later, she started her own organization, Random Kid, which serves as a gathering point online for teens looking to do good. And it integrates social media so that an impact which might have before been contained to one individual knocking on doors can now be spread exponentially. Dana, Alhassan, and Talia's examples are inspiring to me, not because they're stories of these awesome individuals, not because they're so exceptional or they're prodigies or they're special. I think that what is valuable about them is that they really are completely relatable. And what's more, this isn't a story of victims waiting to be rescued, just sitting around in distress for the grown-ups to arrive. This is a story of young people helping each other help themselves. More of this kind of grassroots action needs to be discovered, publicized, and supported. A world where young people get to author their own story is one where we help each other help ourselves, but it's also one where you ask how we can help you. That's a pretty daring statement to make, but I see it this way. Sometimes that can mean bringing in our viewpoints to force organizational change. Sometimes it can mean using our skills to further shared goals. I talked to some folks at Viacom and I was really struck by the fact that at MTV, a lot of people on the executive board have mentors who are actually interns. And I saw that reversal of a typical relationship as extremely, I think, promising of what the future can hold. You see, youth have increasing power in new settings by using the tools that we have at our disposal. And I read countless articles about how we're condemned as slactivists because the extent of our activism is seen as mostly clicking like on Facebook. But that's definitely not true because online social movements can be responsible for massive social change, as concrete, as toppling regimes, or as intangible, yet crucial, as attitude shifts. I would show as an example the greater expectation of transparency. I've grown up on a web that seems to answer my every question with the information I want available at a click. And so running into barriers in this search for information seems abnormal to me. How does this mesh with government cultures of secrecy, classification, the archetypal closed door? Simple. Either governments promote more open door transparency initiatives that publicize and document more of what used to be secret, or we find out for ourselves. This is an age of hackers and citizen journalists using access to knowledge for greater decision making power. And the ability that we have to use technology means that we can be solutions, not problems. This sounds crude, but it's to the point. We want you to use us. I mentioned the stat at the beginning, which placed youth unemployment around 23% according to the Wall Street Journal, but another huge issue, and one that that statistic, that simple number doesn't speak to, is the fact that there are many college grads and many high schoolers over the summer who are stuck in low paying jobs where they're not being fulfilled, where they're not having an impact. They may have skills that allow them to do many things beyond what they're currently doing. Helping bridge the gap between young people oriented towards service with technology skills and local governments still stuck in the dark ages technology wise, a project called Code for America is actually bringing young people into government so that they can more effectively reach out to citizenry with modern technology or help the governments do so. And another project, 17 year old Jaisal Patel's NGO Technologies has created tech solutions for nonprofits. He's already implemented a biogas energy project built information technology infrastructure for an organization supporting Indian cloth weavers and developed website for a nonprofit fighting human rights abuses. I bring up Jaisal's story because again, he's a normal kid quote like Talia, like Dana, like Al Hasan, he goes and sits in a classroom and walking down the street, you probably wouldn't think that he's any different from one of your own kids or someone like me. There are many, many teenagers like Jaisal sitting in classrooms, walking down the street, waiting for the chance to serve. And I don't think they should be in the 23%. I mean no one should. But to return back again to that 23%, these young people problems that I mentioned at the beginning, these aren't just young people problems because what happens to us doesn't happen in a bubble. By the same token, our solutions can be everyone's solutions. A breakthrough in my mind means increased opportunities for us to make our voices heard, whether on stages like these in mass media or through grassroots organization. It means sitting at tables in boardrooms and having input on the solutions that will affect us just as much as our ideas, our attitudes, our unemployment rates will affect you. A breakthrough equals young people helping each other help themselves and established organizations and leaders asking us for help instead of us always seeing it as the other way around. This is what it takes to get rid of a generation's learned helplessness. Coming of age in a digital world, young people like Al Hasan, Dana, Talia, Jaisal and me are redefining ourselves. We are not stock characters in some storybook, the victims in distress waiting to be rescued when the grownups arrive, or the narcissistic villains of the me generation. Our world, it's obviously apparent, is no fairytale. And yet one of the precious things about people my age is that even as we break free of these dichotomous assumptions about who we are, we strive for the same ending as many of those oft-heard childhood tales. You see, when we think about our global story, in all the naivete or hope of our youth, we want to believe that it will end the same way as so many stories, and so they lived happily ever after. That ending starts with including us as authors. Thank you.