Victor Choi, organizer of TEDxMyeongDong in South Korea, recently collaborated with Minae Kwon to help her to host her TEDxYouthSeoul event, which featured local youth speakers, and a mix of youth and adult attendees.
Here, they discuss how TEDxYouthSeoul came to be, finding youth speakers, the importance of a mentor and addressing issues with the current education system in Korea head-on:
Victor, How did you come to be involved with the TEDxYouthSeoul event?
When I was preparing TEDxMyeongDong, Minae contact me and she asked me whether she could be involved with TEDx because TED had inspired her to take an action to execute 'Ideas Worth Spreading.'
I suggested her to be a speaker at TEDxMyeongDong. After a few months, she got a TEDx license to host TEDxYouthSeoul in Korea.
I wanted to help her to host TEDxYouthSeoul -- she was very active and a doer.
How did you go about choosing your speakers?
Victor: This was the first TEDxYouth event in Korea. So it was a little hard to find young speakers.
Minae had already found some speakers from her online community, Youtheca. But, we wanted to be fair and decided to create a contest for potential speakers that we might not have noticed. We chose six speakers from 20 candidates that applied on the TEDxYouthSeoul website.
Minae: I knew that we had a huge pool of talented and inspiring youths in Korea. Locating them was a challenge because it was hard to find students who are TEDish and who are talented youths.
I went to Youtheca, which is an organization of action-driven students sharing their extra-curricular activities. I went through each and every one of the activity leaders' actions and concepts, and started making phone calls explaining TEDx and asking for more information on their activities -- I ended up inviting six speakers. As Victor said, we wanted to expand our search further and held a contest to select six more speakers.
What was your goal with organizing this event? Do you feel as if you accomplished your goals?
Victor: Our theme was 'Entertain Your Dream'. The reason why we picked this theme was because there are too many students giving up their dreams because of the competitive education system in Korea.
In Korea, students must compete against each other to enter a good university -- it kills their diversity and creativity. We have to make an environment where students can entertain their dreams without any pressure. The fact that our young speakers have taken an action to follow their dream absolutely really inspired the audience.
Minae: My goal was to spread the inspiration that I had gotten from TED to my peers in Korea. I also wanted my peers to start being courageous and active, which is something not easy to be in a country where conformity to norm -- especially in the local school system -- is valued.
I am hearing a lot of positive feedback from children, teens and parents about how this event has transformed them. In our culture, going to the trouble of filling out a long non-anonymous feedback form is also not common, but they are already taking action to express what they have felt and even making suggestions. I think I can do much better next time, but yes, I think I have accomplished my goals.
Minae, how did you feel having Victor, organizer of TEDxMyeongDong, as a mentor on your event? Any particularly helpful advice that he gave you?
I feel tremendous gratitude to Victor who was there for me with every step of the preparation and decision making. We had weekly meetings and he was always available for questions and discussions. He was particularly helpful with the technical aspects since I had no experience with the audio/video. He was also helpful with polishing the speakers' presentation slides and making the online brochure. I would like to learn more from him in the future.
Minae, were there any unique challenges that you encountered as a youth organizing this kind of large-scale event?
Being 15, I am younger than all of the speakers except one.
In our culture, especially in our age group, age differences matter a lot. During the process of preparing the speakers, I was at first overwhelmed and afraid while working with them but they were all so cool and did not place my age before the issue at hand.
I also had to work on a regular basis with adults such as Victor, and a representative from the venue provider, Everland. Later, I think I overcame feeling uneasy and just concentrated on getting the job done.
Another challenge was the finances. Finding cash sponsors was a problem -- we had to make the best with what we had. We decided to give up printing paper brochures and just made an online brochure. People with smart-phones were encouraged to download them before coming to the event. Everland printed out the tickets and stickers that we put on the gifts.
As for the stage design, we used recycled cardboard boxes that we spray painted. Thankfully, my mother ended up paying for the printing of the TEDxYouthSeoul letters in the stage design.
I now have a team of students who worked with me as volunteers. They took care of the stage design, ticket and sticker designs, and overall manual labor such as reception, registraton and cleaning. Without them, I could not have pulled this through. They are going to stay with me through our future events, whenever that may be. I feel so lucky to have had so many people help me.
To learn more about the other talented youth organizers of TEDxYouthSeoul visit their 'Team' page
here.
