Young People Are Tackling Systems Change! A Conversation with Nolita Mvunelo, Matías Lara and Vanessa Terschluse

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's educating for hopelessness. Education is not giving you the tools. If you want to be involved, let's say, in politics or in business, you just see the whole picture and say, oh, this is broken so badly. And school just says absolutely nothing about this. Nothing at all.

Hi and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As I often say, we radically underestimate young people and what they're capable of. They are asking to be involved in the critical conversations about systems change, and not only that, but they're also building their own capacities for and with each other about how to engage with systemic issues. So it's a huge pleasure this week to be speaking with Nolita Vunelu, Matthias Lara, and Vanessa Terschlus, who have taken it upon themselves as part of the 50% to gather a collection of insights to enhance young people's understanding of systems and how they move and change. They've recently published the Young Person's Guide to Systems Change. I'll let them introduce themselves in a moment, but just to say that you can find links to the guide and many other resources and the work of the 50% and related initiatives in the show notes.

Great.

Well, let's begin. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. I've been totally excited about seeing the release of the report, which we're going to talk about today. So thank you very much for hustling and jumping on a podcast conversation quite quickly, but no, really happy to have you here with us. So thank you very much. Maybe if you could start by just, yeah, briefly introducing yourself. Maybe Lolita, we start with you.

Thanks for having us, Tim. I'm Lolita Mvunelo. I am one of the co-directors of The Fifty Percent and a program manager at the Club of Rome.

Hi, I'm Vanessa. I am the head of advocacy and content creation at The Fifty Percent.

Hello, I'm Matías Lara. I'm from Argentina and I'm also a co-director at The 50%.

Fantastic. Well, maybe let's talk about what this magical 50% is, because I think that's a really important piece of context to start the conversation before we get specifically into talking about the report. But maybe, Nolita, back to you, if you could just give a little bit of a context setting for what is— why 50% in terms of the name, and also what's the broader network of critically important work that you're doing?

Thanks. So in 2016, according to the Economic Times, 52% of all people under the age of 30, and that's why it's called the 50%, because we aim to work with and represent this 50% of people. We are a global youth platform that aims to empower young people to make an impact. Over time, we've learned that it is more than just making an impact, but it is about creating a better future on multiple fronts. So material, ecological, more social. But it also seems like nothing seems to improve for young people, and the future has a high potential to be incredibly stressful and bleak for young people. But weirdly enough, at the same time, this generation is probably the most educated generation ever in history. And so we started trying to deal with the complexity of that, of like, why is it that young people know so much? And also now we have like Copilot and ChatGPT in our back pocket, but things seem to be getting worse. So then we went on with the mission of how do we work with young people to create a better future. And yeah, I can say the whole story about how we got there, but that's basically what the 50% is.

Yeah, no, that's amazing. And I guess you almost might question if there's something wrong with the education, if we've got all this education but still the world's struggling, right? But yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the thing that's so inspiring about a lot of this work that I do is I get to speak to amazing young people who are not waiting around for other people to take this on. They're really seizing the moment and learning what they need to learn to put things into action. And so it's again, totally inspiring inspiring and important that you're here with me on the podcast and we can get this word out a bit more. But maybe could you just say a little bit more about the context of the 50% in relation to the Club of Rome? So for people that may not know what the Club of Rome is.

Yeah, well, the Club of Rome is an association and its heritage is in supporting and creating holistic solutions to get humanity towards more equity and, and well-being on a healthy planet. So Limits to Growth being the prominent report that came from the club that sort of highlighted that. For many people, the relationship between the Club of Rome and the 50% is that the Club of Rome supports the 50%, is a key enabler of this network of young people, and has been a key collaborator also bringing forth the knowledge about systems thinking and systems change. So although we represent the 52% of young people across the world, we collaborate a lot with Club of Rome members who have this insight on what should we learn, what opportunities can we create in terms of doing different things, creating different opportunities for young people while still maintaining a level of thematic and content independence, which is quite a blessing that we've been able to have that relationship with the Club of Rome.

Amazing. No, that's great. And I guess the systems connection, the context of the Club of Rome being a really important one in raising the question of the global problématique, as it was called in the 1960s, but you know, what we might call the polycrisis or the metacrisis now, and how are we responding. So I think, yeah, it's a I love that you are connected there, but also I think it's important just to understand, you know, there's lots of adults out there wondering how they can be of service and of support to young people who wanna make change in the world. And I think that's, you know, as you say, key enablers, like, you know, there is a role, there's an intergenerational thing that needs to happen. So I think that's, yeah, I love that as well. Thank you so much. And Matthias, maybe then switching over to you, coming in relation to the Young Person's Guide to Systems Change, which has been making a good splash. Out in the world since you released it very recently, and I love it. Just such important work. But could you just give a sense of the why behind it? So like, where did it come from? What were you seeing where you thought there was a need for this kind of support in understanding systems change for young people?

Well, the idea of understanding systems change comes from a couple of years ago. Well, actually, it's in the very roots of The 50%, but we always thought that there's a need to have a broader scope when young people is treating with these kinds of issues. Sadly, we have seen a lot of youth movements over the years that just falls into these sort of traps of the system. One of the ideas that we talk about in the handbook is that the system itself has its own resilience, so it has the ability to sort of absorb whatever it's trying to transform it, to change it. And that happened with a lot of efforts of young people that created movements that has done a lot to change the paradigm, but at the end, they fell in sort of the same practices as a lot of international institutions and other things that are doing not much to change things. So we thought that a good way to cope with all of these problems and a good way to equip activists and young people to deal with all of this was understanding systems change and how systems work in their own local community, not going to the whole international system, which also is helpful, but to understand how small systems in their own local community can actually be changed by having this broader look. So a couple of years ago, in International Youth Day in 2023, we decided to launch this Young Person's Guide to Systems Change, which is a program that has many steps. The first one was a survey. With a couple of videos that we launched a couple of years ago to try to understand what's the vision of young people when regarding systems change. And that, that survey showed us that there was a big need for this. So we started working, then we made this focus group that we made last year. The idea of the focus group was try to collect thoughts of young people from different parts of the world on how they saw systems thinking and how they actually applied it on their communities, on their workplaces, on their university cities, wherever they are. And the idea is that we were working with people that already have some knowledge about this because they have been working on it for many years. And at the end, we kind of discovered that that wasn't so true. People wasn't so aware of systems thinking and how it worked and the specifics. So at the end of the focus group, we said, okay, so we need people to understand how systems change work in a much plainer language. We need to, to talk about this in a way that most people is able to understand it and to apply it, because one of the myths that we're trying to address here is the idea that systems thinking is something for people with a very high level of education, like at a master's degree or even more than that. And what we're trying to say here is no, systems thinking is something you can apply. In your place, no matter how old are you, no matter how small you think the work you're doing is. We believe that your work is huge and it's very important for the world, and we want to share tools with you to do it the better way possible.

Amazing. Oh, I know, I love that. And you talk in the introduction about the invitation, and I really appreciate the way you articulated that. It's like an invitation for people wherever they are to come into the space to explore. And I totally agree with you. I think people are bringing so much implicit knowledge. They already have an understanding about systems because, you know, people live in them every day, right? And it's, it does sometimes get kind of an abstract academic language that's totally unhelpful. And that's absolutely one of the things I loved about the report, the way you'd pitched the language of it really connects with what you were just saying there. So maybe Vanessa, could I ask you just One of the things I was wondering as I was reading it was, and it's great to hear a bit more context actually from Mattias about the survey and the different ways you've heard from many voices all over the world of young people. But obviously the podcast, this podcast is really about thinking about education broadly, but formal schooling and formal education quite often. Maybe just, I'd invite you to reflect a little bit on what perhaps would you have wished you had, or did you not learn when, you know, and feel free others to jump in, but, you know, through school, through college, university, the different formal education experiences you've had, why are people not learning this stuff?

Yeah, thank you so much, Tim. This is a really good question. I think there's a lot of nuance in here. So I think I'm actually someone that has been quite lucky. So my background is in environment management. So I went to the University of Leeds and got a degree in sustainability and environment management. And the way that the degree was set up, it was very much framed around a very interdisciplinary approach, which really got me thinking about systems change and got me really curious about that. As an example, like one case study that I always think about and that blows my mind, that really had me like take a step back and think of like, oh, okay, we really need to start thinking in, in a more systematic way, is the case study of the Boxing Day tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004. Of course, a very tragic tsunami that led to a lot of deaths. But when you actually start looking at who died in that tsunami, As an example, if you look at Indonesia, the death rate was 3 to 1 in terms of women dying over men. In some villages in India, only women died. So then you start kind of asking these questions of why did that happen? And, you know, there are just things that like I would have never crossed my mind. As an example, in Indonesia, in a lot of locations, it was a taboo for women to learn how to swim or to learn how to climb trees. So they were more likely to die because of the division of gender roles. It means that they are more often at home. They were looking after vulnerable members in their communities. They were taking roles of caregivers. So again, they were more vulnerable. The way that resources were dispersed after a disaster also meant that women were more impacted. But yeah, the reason why I'm talking about this, it was one of the case studies that I think really like made me take a step back and really start analyzing how everything is systematically connected. But while I think I was really lucky in being able to access that through education, I think the thing that stands out to me most is that unfortunately not a lot of people are. So as I said, while I had that interest and really wanted to study sustainability and also like got that exposure, I only really reached that at a university level, you know, which not everyone has access to go to university. And also for me, the reason why I wanted to go into that, because growing up in Brazil, I witnessed a lot of environmental degradation. So I was really keen on learning more about that. So it was like that exposure that I had as a young child that really drove me towards that. But like, If we really want to see a global movement of more young people getting involved in that, we really need to start talking about these issues much, much younger. As an example, like, I went to like a family event this weekend and I was talking to a child that is 10 years old and they were asking me like, what is climate change? And for me, that took me a step back. Like, of course, this is something that's really complex and there's a lot of like difficulties in like sharing that with younger kids, but it's also something that will impact their futures very much so. So I think making sure that kids are getting access to those topics much earlier on in education and kind of like incentivizing to take that interest. I think also there's something around, which is not necessarily the fault of the education system, but I think we need to start looking at how the education system can tackle it, is around privilege. So as an example, if you look in the UK, people of color are much more likely to study degrees where they feel like they're going to get a return on investment much quicker, which means like a lot of times they go into degrees such as medicine, law, and I can see that in my course, like there was a very small number of people of color, a very small number of people from the Global South, because they just simply, a lot of times those people really didn't feel like it was accessible to them. And as an example, like, while me, I'm someone from the Global South, I also had a lot of financial privilege and security, which if I didn't have, I probably wouldn't be pursuing that degree. Again, in the UK, we're seeing a lot of like a backlash around we should be funding science and STEM degrees more over the humanities. But when we look at like climate change, when you look at the systematic issues that we have, we really need the humanities. So continuing to kind of like invest in that, invest in like culture and art as well. I mean, if we look at as an example, like the political movements and the rise of like right-wing conservatism around young people, there is a growing issue around literacy amongst young people. But we're also seeing how conservative organizations are kind of like co-opting cultural movements to push specific agendas to kind of like uphold these systems that we have, which for me, I think really highlights like the importance of like art and literature and all these topics that we see as softer, and we need to continue to invest in that.

Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot there. Thank you. That's amazing. I mean, just to pick on one piece of that, the young, the age thing is something I've thought about a lot. I've got relatively young kids myself and working with young people of all ages. It's a challenge to know how young, and I've had this conversation with other teachers and other educator colleagues. It's how young is too young to be introducing them to these kinds of big, really, in a way complex, in a way existential, in a way really challenging emotional topics, climate change, et cetera. And it's, so I think it's, I don't have the answer there at all, but I, it's an, I think it's a really important question that we're thinking about supporting and nurturing our young people to feel safe and that they belong and that they're, you know, they're cared for in many ways while at the same time saying, it's going to take all of us. And so, yeah, introducing them to these ideas younger than perhaps we have done in the past. Yeah, it's a fascinating one.

I mean, reflecting on my education, but I mean, I have an education from South Africa from grade zero and now to my master's level. And to answer your question, if I were to steal a statement that I heard in a podcast two days ago, so this is very timely, it was an interview of a successful entrepreneur from Nigeria, and he said in Africa in general, but I think it relates in South Africa also, we receive a lot of training, not a lot of skilling. And I'll elaborate on that further. But there is a Club of Rome report that came out 46 years ago called No Limits to Learning, and they described this gap as innovative learning versus maintenance learning. So by training, what he meant is that like imparting information based on things we know from the past, right? I did my undergraduate in engineering. And so, and also I did accounting and all that sort of stuff in high school. School. So, and I know science, I know carbon, I know what's in the air, and you know what percent of oxygen is in the air and all that sort of stuff. And as I mentioned earlier, now we have like Copilot and Claude and ChatGPT, so all of this information is incredibly accessible. But that's typically the education most people receive up to an undergraduate level. It's just like a lot of training so you can know as much as possible based on information that was learned in the past. But when it comes to skills, I understand skills to be the ability to use this knowledge to create something meaningful and to create new knowledge and to have the capacity to imagine beyond what we have been taught. So like innovative learning. So Tim Logan, to your question about at what age is it appropriate, etc., the, the double-edged sword about systems thinking is that you do then start to see the world for its complexity, which can be incredibly overwhelming. But I think a key skill that's important to manage the type of complexity that the world is dealing with right now, even at a grade level, is to start to have the skills to embrace it. How can we become more innovative and more future-facing, create enough room for creativity while also giving the important training there is? You know, there is some level of success to the fact that like most Most humans know that water is made out of H2O, etc., etc. But also, at the same time, not a lot of us get to the point where we know how we manage our water and how to do something different and how to do something better. And it's a journey that unfortunately we seem to expect young people to just figure out at a master's level, or to go into work and know how to challenge things, or to become innovators. And we get frustrated with this. And to Vanessa's point, because the appetite for absorbing risk economically is so low, but also there's just an exclusion from education in multiple levels for various communities that without having an early opportunity to drive this appetite for innovation, for complexity, that's a critical skill that's needed in most societies to overcome the challenges that exist. I come from a continent where 75% of people are under 30, so if the 50% was an African organization, it would have been called the 75%, right? So, so I won't I would say the earlier the better, because I also, again, like I said, it's complexity can be incredibly daunting and challenging and, you know, make you face a lot of existential questions to, like, as Mathias said, systems are incredibly resilient. And when you come from the Global South, that resilience is not to your benefit. And that can be incredibly disempowering and scary. But the capacity to innovate, the capacity to imagine better futures and start to test and pilot and build community around it is something that we cannot bypass when we are working towards building a better future.

Amazing. Couldn't agree more. It's amazing. And I mean, one of the phrases I loved in the report was that the systems shaping our world aren't broken as much as they're in desperate need of an upgrade that includes all voices. And I think that bit at the end is the, I mean, obviously all of it's important, but the includes all voices feels like a really resonant, particularly at the moment as that kind of idea of diversity is being challenged in certain places. Very unhelpfully, but I think there's something incredibly important. So, I mean, just as a question, I'm just curious, as you were going through that process of surveying and engaging with young people all around the world, how much commonality did you see amongst young people from different places, from Global South and, and Global North and in, you know, different contexts and how much diversity were you seeing maybe in the different kinds of needs that young people were saying they had or, or different kind of, as you say, this kind of innovative learning that they wanted to build, but maybe not quite sure what it is. I mean, how— yeah, what were you seeing, how it shows up differently for different people based on their lived experience?

I would say that Global South problems are very common amongst every latitude. Problems like corruption are deep in the root of our political and economical systems and social systems. Well, of course, poverty, gender inequality, lack of access to education or low-quality education when it exists, addressing what Nolita and Vanessa said before, education is not preparing young people for the future. Best case scenario is preparing them for a past over 50 years. So it's not teaching or it's not imparting education to be able to innovate and be resilient to the challenges that everyone's facing now, but also it's educating for hopelessness. Education is not giving you the tool, you, I mean, If you want to be involved, let's say, in politics or in business, you just see the whole picture and say, oh, this is broken so badly. And they say, so I don't want anything to do with this. You get into politics and you find fanaticism, corruption, right-wing extremism nowadays, hate speech, misinformation, and polarization in social media in a way that's so discouraging. And school just says absolutely nothing about this, nothing at all. So I would say that when talking about Global South issues, they're pretty much aligned. Of course, every country, every, even every community, every society has its own agenda and its own pressing matters that are most urgent for some. But I would say that in general, there's a huge need for tools, to be able to hope for something that's different, to be able to say— at a part of the handbook, one of the parts I like the most is that phrase that says, "You can take solace in knowing you're a part of a generation that's brave enough to try." And that starts with the idea of it is possible to make a change and you are able to make it. So I would say that's kind of the line that puts everyone together.

Incredible. Yeah, no, so powerful. Thank you, Mathias. That's amazing.

Um, with these commonalities also, we have a partner called Youth Talks, and what they've done is they've consulted 46,000 young people, gathering over a million insights. And this they did in 2024, if I remember correctly, if not 2023. And through that also, we were able to learn quite a lot of things. So to Mathias's point about the hope, that that was like the resounding feedback. It was a qualitative survey, so it wasn't a, do you believe in climate change, yes or no, but it was open-ended questions such as, what are your hopes for your future, what are you concerned about, etc. We do see some differences. If I recall correctly, for example, when it comes to changes I'm willing to make to make the future better, right, there was a bit of a disparity amongst like youth in the US and EU who were happy to make personal changes but cautious about other types of changes. Or in the question about what are my priorities for the future, or what part of my education is helping me become equipped for the future, we saw in that survey that like young people in Sub-Saharan Africa are incredibly aspirational, which, you know, brings data to Vanessa's point about wanting to do better for your community, wanting to do better for yourself and your family is important. A lot of young people in the West felt like their education was teaching them about how to live with each other in their society. And this is showing up in the polarization that we're seeing in the political sphere that, you know, 2 years ago, young people were on the money. It's surprising why everyone is shocked about the political outcome when the young people who were surveying knew what was going on. But interestingly enough, when I think the survey had about 3,000 young people in China, and they spoke a lot about like the value of their education in maths and sciences, it's like, that's it's a non-negotiable, it's a critical part. And that makes sense for the context that they're coming from. But the resounding feedback was, we want peace and good living with each other. That was just the summary of the report. And that was also one of the things that inspired us to be like, okay, if there is this thing that's in common, what would be a first principle tool that we could work with young people about so they can learn about the opportunities to make this happen?

Incredible, amazing work. And maybe, I mean, Vanessa, if I could come to you, I think that's a really nice segue into, again, another great phrase in the report that community is the ultimate leverage point. And this whole section about we-ness in it just being so important, great word, critically important, but it speaks to what both Matthias and Nolita I think have just been saying. But maybe, yeah, just if you say a bit more about this idea of we-ness Yeah, definitely.

I mean, if you look at the systems that we exist in, I think capitalism is one of the most like all-encompassing kind of like human-made systems in which we exist in. And Matthias talks a lot about this, but it's also a very resilient system. And it's undoubtedly, whether side you stand on, whether you think capitalism is great or not, I think it's undoubtedly is currently in the way that it exists and in the way that it's set up, driving a lot of the issues that we have, right? So in terms of climate change, in terms of growing inequality, inaccessible healthcare. It's driving a lot of the issues that we have. And if we look at the narratives that are kind of keeping the system up, it is really sustaining by, but it also drives these narratives because that's how it keeps existing around individualism and a competitive mindset, right? It basically tells us, and this is kind of like the cultural frameworks that it's built upon, it really tells us that we have to put ourselves or maybe our nuclear families first over others and that that we're basically competing with others over limited resources. But when we actually take a step back and we start looking at narratives of like community and we start realizing like how connected we are to each other, but also just within our ecosystems, like not just to each other, but to the species that we share this world with, with the nature that we share this world with, we realize that we actually live in a very resource-rich planet and a planet that's very abundant. And actually, this idea of competitive is a very man-made idea. That is not needed at all. I mean, as an example, we're really seeing the worst of that narrative now play out. As a lot of we see is that kind of like anti-immigration narrative, right, that is becoming really nasty and it's been driven by a lot of political parties right now, which again is in often cases a very made-up narrative. If we look at a lot of the like issues that people are facing, like immigrants coming into our communities is not actually what's making people poor. As an example, if if we look in the UK, and I'm not denying that, of course, supporting immigrants coming in costs resources and that governments need to look at budgets and things like that. But if we look at the actual value that immigrants bring into communities, into the job market, things like that, almost any study will tell you that the value that we get from immigration is so much higher. We also know in terms of the jobs that they support us in, but also just in terms of like cultural diversity, connection, and all these kind of like more intangible benefits. So we know that actually immigration is a net gain. When we actually, however, look at as an example the way that like taxation system is set up and like who actually is benefiting from it, this narrative around individualism is actually pitching us against the wrong enemies, right? So if we're looking at like fossil fuel CEOs and billionaires, people that have like known for a really long time that actually climate change is a very big issue and then have paid a lot of money to hide that away from people and are amassing those resources while continuing to burn all our future These are the real enemies. So when we actually come together, as an example, in local communities, we realize that if we take that immigration example, we're not actually very different from each other. We often have the same challenges that we're facing. We want the same things. We want a better future for our children. We want good jobs. And to achieve all these things, you need people to come together. You need widespread movement building. That's how you change system. And which is why I think now this kind of like individualistic narrative is being driven so much because it keeps people from from actually coming together and really getting together and working on these changes that need to happen, because we're only going to change the systems if we do come together. There's no way to achieve that individually. So that's why it's so important. But also on like a smaller scale, I mean, a lot of the issues that we have nowadays, like the way that we alleviate them is through community. So if we look at like climate adaptation and climate resilience, what does that actually mean? Like, you know, a lot of times it looks like sharing resources with your neighbors. It looks like having like early warning systems, which again, connection and like knowing your neighbors is very important. Or if we look at like poverty alleviation, again, sharing resources, looking after each other, things like healthcare, a much more community-driven mindset is how we tackle a lot of the issues and alleviate a lot of the systemic challenges that people are facing nowadays.

Absolutely. And I mean, it strikes me that, you know, Matthias, you were talking about tools and the importance of the tools in terms of systems change. Absolutely agree., but I also think sometimes if we only focus on the tools, we're missing the, the holding of the ways that we do the work and the ways we do the work is together. So no, I, I mean, I so appreciated that about the report, the way that you situate we-ness and community as kind of almost the underpinning of then, yes, sure, tools are useful, but they're only generally useful in community with each other because otherwise, you know, everybody's got their own tool and they're going off pulling in all, all sorts sorts of different directions. No, it's so powerful. And I mean, I'm conscious that for people who haven't yet had a chance to look at the report, maybe could we just spend a little moment on some of the content of the report? So what kinds of things are in the report that would support people's understanding, better understanding of systems change? So, I mean, maybe we could just pick on a couple or, you know, something that jumps out to you as one of your, the most interesting things that you learned during the compiling of the report, or something you felt maybe one of the most powerful tools within the systems change kind of toolkit?

Well, the idea is that the guide is sort of an introduction to systems thinking in the way we see it. So of course, we go over a little bit of the traditional knowledge about systems thinking, especially following Donella Meadows' scope around it. So we go over what are the elements in a system. We talk about what integrates it, how the interactions build the system, and we talk about purposes. One of the main ideas that we believe in and that we have seen is that it's very important to understand what a system's actual purpose is, not the stated purpose, but the actual purpose. As Vanessa was saying about climate movement, for example, and fight against climate change, you would say, well, the whole international system that's created to counter, to fight climate change is the purpose, it's to avoid. Climate change and to lower carbon emission and to fight the change of the biodiversity. But when you see the statements and the actions that has come from COPs, you see almost nothing at all, things that are not meaningful. So maybe the purpose is somewhere around actually validating the system to keep going as it is without having climate activism changing it with strength. So the stated purpose, which is lower carbon emissions, is not the same as the actual purpose, which is validating the business as usual. So the idea is to say, okay, so systems thinking tells you these are the parts of a system, but what the parts are or how the parts actually work. And then we go to leverage points, which are the ways to be more effective to change a system. And then we go to, uh, we-ness and the power of storytelling. That's kind of the whole focus. But I would say that as a thought that goes through all the guide is the idea that there are no magical recipes to change the systems around you. It's not that we have a wand here that we're able to say, so now you're a systems thinker and now you're able to change your community. There are a lot of people doing systems change without knowing a thing about Donella Meadows' theory. Because at the end, what this is all about, and that's why we keep going back to community and to we-ness, is to build strong relations with people based on the criteria that things cannot keep being the same as they are right now. So we're not here to say we know how to change the systems. There's a lot of people who already know it. We're just trying to put it in in words that counters the narrative that it is not possible.

Amazing. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I was thinking as you were speaking there was, and I, I think about quite a lot, is that even the phrase systems thinking feels to me sometimes a bit insufficient because it, it focuses on just thinking, right? And actually, so much of what you were just describing there is, is systemic work somehow, right? Through systemic understanding that we have in all sorts of ways through our bodies, through our communities, in many different ways. And then the action, what are you, you know, how are you doing that work, weaving those relationships, doing that community-based work, doing what, you know, whatever you're putting into practice, maybe getting it wrong sometimes. And so I sometimes worry that the phrase systems thinking quite easily gets captured by the old kind of narrative of just the important things happening are just in your prefrontal cortex. And if you can do some smart thinking and that'll solve the problem. And that feels pretty, pretty insufficient right about now.

And if I may, the idea of leverage points, it's actually counterintuitive with that, because when you see leverage points, and I don't want to get technical, but when you see leverage points, like measuring metrics and public policies are like on the very surface of systems change. So the actual meaningful things is to try to get people to change the way that their beliefs are based. Like the paradigm and also the patterns, the way we act every single day. So it's not about the high-level thinking that we're doing every day and the metrics and the— you see all these resources like in international organizations going towards measuring and public policy. And there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of reports being done to public policy every single week from hundreds of different organizations. That achieves almost nothing because at the end, politics don't care about all of these issues. So the point is also how do we change the paradigm that at the end will force politics. So if they want to survive, they want to keep being in politics, they're going to need to adapt to this. So we need to change on the very basis and spend more resources on doing this collective change of thought. And as I said before, there are already Millions of heroes everywhere in the world already doing this, just not with this framework, but with their own experiences and courageousness.

Absolutely. And most of the time they're not the ones on the stage, you know, doing the keynote professing to have all the answers, right? So absolutely, we need to start listening some more for sure. But maybe if we could just briefly, Vanessa, if I could come to you just on this piece about storytelling, because I think like what I'm hearing from you there, Matthias, is like connecting with the, you know, the heart of people and connecting with the emotion and the, you know, the relationships and the humanness of community, right? Is like, it's not something that's gonna happen through a, you know, a high-level policy report. And there's something else that's much more deep and human and ancient as story that also many people are talking about. And I also love that you bring this into the report as well. So yeah, Vanessa, Could you just speak a little bit to that idea of why the stories we tell are so important?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think we talked a lot about basically the systems and why they exist and also why they're so resilient. And I feel like we keep banging on about narratives, but there's a reason why they're so important. Again, as I said, they do underpin the systems that exist right now. And how do we change these narratives? It is through storytelling. And again, the other thing that we talked a lot about is that kind of need to one, connect connect people to issues that are often very complex, that might feel very removed from them, but also to connect people back to each other again and to realize that they have a power to bring about a lot of change, especially when they work together. And I think, again, we achieve that through story. As you already mentioned, Tim Logan, storytelling is a very ancient thing to humans, and it is something that's very emotional. And we've really found— and I'm sure we're not the only ones that found this, I mean, there's plenty of studies around this about how, like, people do have a different response to stories than they do to, as an example, hard data, right? So it's something that gets people engaged with an issue and helps them connect with it emotionally. At the same time, it's also through stories that we learn. Again, I was talking before about we-ness and how we need to kind of like overcome these barriers that have kind of been constructed to keep us away from like our collective power, right? And I think it's through stories that we realize Oh, we're actually not so different, like behind our like culture and race and gender and all these things that we have like as labels on top of us. We usually care about the same things. They might show up differently in how we care about them, but that's how we connect. So that's one thing why it's really important. The other thing, we talked a lot about hope, and I know we see— example, I talk a lot about climate because that's a lot of the nature of the work that I do. But of course, I think that applies to a lot of different systems, right? A lot of the narratives that we have right now, a lot of the ways that we see the media report on this, but also that global leaders talk about this. It's a very defeatist narrative, right? And as an example, like when we started our storytelling fellowship and we started talking to young people like, oh, you're super interested in this, like how come you don't feel involved? Like one thing that really, really just surprised me is like how many young people, and Matthias again talked about this, people that might not kind of like see themselves as like activists, system thinkers, but who are actually already doing brilliant work work, but at the same time didn't feel that sense of confidence in the work that they're doing and felt really hopeless and felt like they couldn't make a difference. And I think if we kind of change that narrative, if we focus a little bit more about, yeah, the success that is possible, if we showcase where success has happened, that really kind of builds a narrative around hope. And it basically, as I said, connects us to that challenge because, again, often the narrative around it is like about everything that we need to give up and everything that we need to lose, to like reach net zero and everything. But at the same time, climate change is a fight to protect everything that we love, like everything, the way that we live, it's all connected. And it's through telling stories that we can remind people of that and really motivate them to action. And especially young people, like if we feel like this is something that's a bit— of course we don't want to be talking to them about like death tolls and like extreme heat and things like that. But I think that kind of like storytelling can be a very powerful tool to talk to them, like maybe start thinking about how the world around them is changing, the potential impact it has, things in their community, the way that their food grows, things like that. Like, I think it's a really powerful tool to get people engaged in this.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Brilliant. And yeah, maybe just to finish off, Nalita, if I could come back to you just on, let's say we definitely want to avoid this being another report that gets produced and put on shelves and not have the impact it should have. And that's why I wanted to get you on the podcast because I'm absolutely, I'd love to just support in any way I can to get this out there because this is critical work that you're doing and I so appreciate it. So yeah, lastly, what's the call to action? Or, you know, how are you continuing this work now that the guide's been published? You know, what are the plans and what and how can people get involved?

Thank you. And also thank you so much for the support you have given to this guide. Firstly, we invite all 50 percenters to join us. I said in the opening note that we started as 4 people, we're We're at just over 2,000, and if we can make it all the way to the 4 billion that it's supposed to represent, then we would have won. We would have succeeded in creating the sense of we-ness. And we have like a lot of resources and opportunities for young people to connect with one another. Community genuinely is a core function of The Fifty Percent. So we invite them to Google The Fifty Percent, spelling out 50%, and join us there. We will be doing a 6-week program called the Young Person's Guide to Systems Change, which is essentially the course version of this report introducing systems thinking to young people. And we do 2 cohorts a year. So the first one will be in May, but the next one will be in September or October. So that will be available for them. And for educators and your general community, we need partnerships. Partnerships, and we need implementation partners. As I said at the start, a lot of the development of a young person, especially when it comes to gaining that sense of innovative learning, happens outside of the classroom. So we would like to have implementation partners to help us get opportunities for young people to gain these skills, to get out there. We have young people aspiring to be politicians, we have young people aspiring to be innovators, to be entrepreneurs. And our big ambitious goal is that this is an intergenerational effort. So, you know, 50% becomes the 100% where there will always be a senior person willing to work with a young person in being in community, working together and developing these opportunities. And if any educators are interested in working with us on that, we have like universities that we partner with, etc. Delivering a lot of our material, then for them to please email us at info@thefiftypercent.org. And we would love to work with you in developing further these opportunities for the young people that we all have within our spheres of influence.

Fantastic. Yeah, that's great. And I'll definitely obviously link to all of the things you've mentioned in the show notes. And, you know, just a quick shout out to the other people. You know, there were other collaborators on the report who aren't joining us today, but I saw listed in the report. So just—

Yeah, so The Fifty Percent is represented by a team of amazing 6 people. That is myself, Matthias, Vanessa, and Kristen Miller, who leads a lot of our work on storytelling and capacity building on storytelling for young people, and our two community coordinators, well, community coordinator Anna Sophia, and our monthly wrap host, which brings together our community on a monthly basis, that is Japheth. This report was co-authored with the focus group, the pilot group that Matthias mentioned. So that is ECHO, it's EFFI, it's Nodhlantla, Sarah, it's Esther and Claudius who have pioneered this work. And we're working with some of them pretty closely in bringing this work into different geographies and different subject matter spaces. So watch out for the team because they'll be doing awesome stuff.

Brilliant. Oh, thank you so much. So happy to have you. Totally inspiring work. And thank you so much for everything you're doing.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Tim Logan.

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