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- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Daryna, co founder of OpenPhone. My dad is a business owner and growing up I'll never forget his old ringtone. He made it as loud as it could go because he could not afford to miss a single customer call. That stuck with me when we started OpenPhone. Our mission was to help businesses not just stay in touch, but make every customer feel valued no matter when they might call. OpenPhone gives your team business phone numbers to call and text code customers all through an app on your phone or computer. Your calls, messages and contacts live in one workspace so your team can stay fully aligned and reply faster. And with our AI agent answering 24. 7, you'll really never miss a customer. Over 60,000 businesses use OpenPhone. Try it now and get 20% off your first six months@openphone.com tech and we can port your existing numbers over for free. Open Phone no missed calls, no missed.
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B
Customers in today's fast changing digital world, proving your company is trustworthy isn't just important for growth, it's essential. That's why Vanta is here. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation and continuous monitoring. So whether you're a startup tackling your first SoC2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so you can win bigger deals sooner. The results According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slash over $500,000 a year in costs and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. 10,000 global companies trust Vanta, including Atlassian, Quora, Chili Piper and factory. Visit vanta.com tedaudio to sign up for a free demo. That's v A n T a dot com TEDAUDIO Feel good about Back to.
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C
School with help from Whole Foods Market. Thanks to their high standards, you can keep banned food ingredients like high fructose corn syrup out of lunchboxes all year. Check out Whole Foods Market unmatched selection of allergen friendly options for all kinds of special diets. Find what you need without dairy, gluten, nuts or whatever you're trying to avoid. Get Back to school ready at Whole Foods Market in store and online.
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D
Foreign.
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C
You'Re listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host Elise Hu for social entrepreneur Anshul Tiwari what began as a personal blog, became a movement of change, making stories. In this talk, he shares how Youth Kiyawas, a digital platform made to give Indian youth a space to speak out on social issues, has turned into a powerful tool to harness the power of young voices, proving that making an impact can be a daily accessible habit.
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D
In 2008, when I was 17, I felt invisible and not like Harry Potter with an invisibility cloak. I actually felt really powerless. I remember watching the news every single day with my parents. It was like a ritual in our house. 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 there was absolutely nowhere to go. My friends who I spoke with, my teachers who I spoke with, they all reminded me of the only thing that mattered, and that was how I performed in my exams. And that's it. So I was extremely disappointed, very frustrated, and the only thing that I knew and I loved was writing. So I started a blog. 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. I launched a writer's training program. Young people, they want better jobs, they want to be skilled. So I thought, I'll skill them in writing. And by that time, by the way, I had about 1,000 readers on the blog. So I thought about 30 people will apply. At least 30 people will apply for this program. And to my surprise, only two did. 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 issues, 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. 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. India's largest citizen media platform. 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. So let me tell you about Ashwini. Ashwini was a medical student studying in the state of Rajasthan. And he had this phenomenal habit. Every single summer break, he would go to the closest village and provide free medical services. So he went to this village called Rajghat. A couple of kilometers away from 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. There were no proper roads. There was no electricity. 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. Imagine a village of single men. But like I said, Ashwini saw this as more than just a medical crisis. He wanted to do so much more for Rajgat. 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. NGOs came there. The first time in many years. Decision makers came to Rajgat. And support began to rally. The courts took suomoto cognizance and asked the government to act. Slowly, electricity came to Rajgat. The first ever school was built in Rajghat as well. And. And guess what? The first wedding in 22 years. And Ashwini was not alone. After Ashwini, we saw Jolly's story. Jolly was a wheelchair user. Struggled her entire life to find access accessible toilets. Her story went so viral, was read by more than a million people in less than a week. Including the HR of her organization. That all the toilets at her workplace were reconstructed for her. After Jolly came Raees. Raees talked about how there was a complete lack of menstrual hygiene awareness in the state of Kashmir in India. 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. And not just that 18,000 Indians were brought back to the country because his story made an impact. Now these are not anomalies. We saw hundreds of them over the years. And what we realized was that we were really building individual agencies. We were enabling a muscle, the muscle of change making. But as the platform grew, the world became a lot more complex. We realized that the issues are also becoming very complex. It's difficult to get heard more and more the louder the world gets. And climate change seemed like this faceless, shapeless, this mammoth of a beast that we just did not know what to do about. Thousands of young people had written about climate change on youth Kiyawas but it was almost like we were talking at it. We didn't know what to do about it. So in 2023 we decided to do something different. We decided that we are going to collectivize these voices. So we launched a campaign called Zero say Hero. The idea was very simple. We'll bring together young people, we'll get thousands of their stories and we'll build a common platform where young people, decision makers, businesses, nonprofits, they can all come together to talk about something that climate experts love to talk about. Net zero. Nobody understands it. We wanted people to understand it. This is the reality. So 0suhero started. We ran thousands of polls, we ran many surveys. We trained thousands of citizens to tell their climate stories in their own way. And slowly the campaign became a national campaign. People started talking about it in close circles. It became a public conversation with we started organizing dialogues with policymakers and young people on the same dais and things began to move forward. We noticed a larger net zero conversation happening in India. So in 2023 we did something else as well. We partnered with India's National Institute of Urban affairs to co create the country's first youth engagement frameworks that puts young people at the center of climate decision making in cities. And this year we are beginning to roll it out across the country in multiple cities along with city governments. And this really changes the perspective. We were building individual agency and we realized that at some point we're actually building collective agency as well. We're trying to move things forward a lot faster. But this generation, Gen Z, Gen Alpha gets criticized a lot and I'm here for them. It's very important to stand for them. What we realized was that for the younger generation, it's very important to build the reflex of change making as something that is as simple as texting a friend. Something that really makes them feel like they're beginning to participate, they're beginning to change the conversation somewhere. So this year, we're beginning to use AI to do that. We are building the country's first WhatsApp bot that uses AI to to send thousands of young people in our community one single question on a critical issue a day. Answering this makes them realize that critical thinking is deeply important. But in return, we get access to critical data about what young people are thinking, the future that they are imagining, so we can make better use of it and talk to policymakers about things that truly matter. And let me also tell you one very important thing, which is that this kind of work cannot happen on your regular social media. Social media is not built for social change. It's built for vanity. It's not built for equity. Right. It's unfortunately built to enhance the loudest voice, not necessarily the most authentic. So what does this mean? This means that we need to invest in storytelling. We need to invest in collectivizing voices. And that means we need to invest in community. We've built a blueprint for how we can do it in India, and we cannot wait to take it across the world to every single young person. Thank you.
- [12:57]
C
That was Anshul Tiwari speaking at TED Countdown Summit Nairobi in Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team. Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmarniewong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feedback. Thanks for listening.
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This is Paige, the co host of Giggly Squad. I use Uber Eats for everything and I feel like people forget that you can truly order anything, especially living in New York City. It's why I love it. You can get Chinese food at any time of night, but it's not just for food. I order from CVS all the time. I'm always ordering from the grocery store store. If a friend stops over, I have to order champagne. I also have this thing that whenever I travel, if I'm ever in a hotel room, I never feel like I'm missing something because I'll just Uber Eats it. The amount of times I've had to Uber eats hair items like hairspray, deodorant, you name it, I've ordered it. On Ubereats. You can get grocery alcohol everyday essentials in addition to restaurants and food you love. So in other words, get almost every anything with Uber eats. Order now for alcohol. You must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
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B
This is Mike. Mike's stuck in traffic. The only thing that could make this worse is if he promised to cook his date dinner at 8. Which he did. But it's now 7:30 and he's still on the 5. Good thing Mike has Grubhub plus with Prime. $0 delivery fees, 0 stress, 0 rush. Dinner's covered and so is his reputation. Free Grubhub Plus. It's on prime additional terms and fee supply.