How to Be an Active Citizen and Spark Change | Gabriel Marmentini | TED

Here you can see a Brazilian baby.

Cute, huh?

And he isn't just a baby.

It's a baby citizen.

Once we are born, voila!

Magically, we are already citizens, right?

Partially right, at least for me.

Yes, we do have rights, duties, we belong to a nation.

When growing up, we are probably going to pay taxes and to vote.

And all these are well-known characteristics for good citizens.

And indeed they are relevant, they are true.

But thinking just this way,

we are reducing a beautiful concept of citizenship.

Because citizenship is way more than that,

and I’ll explain why soon.

By the way, I am this baby.

(Laughter)

I mean, I was.

And I was smiling in this picture because mommy told me

that I would be a great citizen one day.

(Laughter)

And I would do a TED Talk to share my ideas.

(Laughter)

But unfortunately, this is not true.

My mom never told me that.

How could she?

No one prepared her to be a citizen.

Then she wouldn't know what is to be a great one, right?

People in my country are mostly individuals rather than citizens,

like my mom and myself in the past.

And that's the point here.

The unpreparedness for citizenship

is the most democratic behavior among us Brazilians.

It doesn't matter where you came from, your gender, your age,

your professional background, or any other thing.

The probability that you are a prepared citizen is really low.

And for the context, I am 30 years old

and our constitution is just 35.

So it's really new, right?

We are still figuring out how to be a democracy.

You probably already got my point here.

We are not baby citizens, no one is born as a citizen.

We are just individuals.

And citizenship is something

that we might conquer through life experiences.

Citizenship requires effort.

We need to acquire knowledge.

We need to pass through real life experiences where we put our hands on.

And maybe we can be called a citizen one day.

And that's my idea worth spreading here.

The only takeaway I want you to bring back home

is the reflection about you being a citizen or just an individual.

And for those who think that can strengthen your journey

to be a better citizen or to start being a citizen,

I have here the citizen metamorphosis process to share with you.

It's just four ingredients, it's really basic stuff.

You're going to see that there is nothing mind-blowing there.

What is mind-blowing in my ingredients

is that we are just not putting them in practice,

and I don't know why.

They are simple, fun and necessary.

But before entering the citizen metamorphosis process,

I need to align with you three assumptions.

Citizenship for Gabriel in my conception is about solving public problems.

So if you're not going toward solving things that are bothering you in society,

if you're not choosing a problem that resonates with your heart

and with your mind and really try to solve it,

you are not a citizen for me.

Secondly, the state is not a hero.

We rely and we expect a lot of things,

that someone is going to solve our problems,

especially the state, in some countries.

And the state, of course, is important, but it’s just one actor.

We need to unite all sectors to solve public problems together.

And finally, we are a complex society.

We can see wicked problems everywhere, every day.

Just take a look at the UN agenda for 2030.

Maybe we are just copy and pasting the SDGs and trying again

because we are failing a lot.

So we need to solve public problems together.

That's about being a citizen.

So now I have my ingredients here to share with you.

It's just four.

Nothing mind-blowing there.

Remember, basic stuff.

In Brazil, we like to call basic stuff as the rice and the beans.

It’s a delicious dish that we eat a lot.

So we need to look forward for the rice and the beans

to do something as citizens.

First, political knowledge.

We are raised listening to bad things about politics, right?

It's something that is corrupted, it's boring, it's difficult to understand,

so we must avoid it.

That's wrong.

Politics is beautiful,

and it's a beauty tool for transformation.

But we need to understand how to use it.

And when you dive into this concept,

you need to acquire the basic knowledge to understand your country,

how your country is organized,

which institutions are there,

what they do,

what are the political parties,

the ideologies,

why you're paying taxes,

where your money is going.

All these basic answers you must have to be a citizen.

If you don't have it, you need to look forward for it.

Especially in a world of misinformation, this gets quite important.

So political knowledge as the first ingredient.

The second one is plural dialogue.

It's really comfortable to talk about people we love and we agree with.

And finding divergency,

people that will make us feel uncomfortable somehow

is just making us grow.

Going outside the bubbles, the echo chambers and all this.

It’s important, and I promise you, you’re going to learn something new.

It's not about tolerating everything

and agreeing with everything people will say,

but it's about trying to understand how they got to this perspective

and what can you learn from them.

Thirdly, we have civic empathy,

and I bet you've been listening to the word empathy a lot recently.

But I'm not talking about empathy with human beings.

That, of course, is something important.

But are we exercising empathy with our neighborhood,

with our community, with our city?

Trying to see our city as a human being for a moment

and understand there’s emotions there, [suffering].

We need to help it to be better

and to identify our city gaps is our role as citizens

and acknowledge that all problems that are surrounding us

and that are bothering us, we made them.

Somehow, we contributed to the existence of these problems.

So this is civic empathy.

And finally, community protagonism.

And I love this, because what is the point of having knowledge,

knowing how to dialogue,

understanding your city gaps,

if you're not putting your hands on to do something?

And these beautiful words here tell us two things:

community first.

You need to look local and then maybe you can go global.

The big revolution comes from small revolution.

So look to your community and that's good.

And protagonism because you have the power.

You can do whatever you want, you just need to move on for it.

So I've been applying this recipe for a long time

in two civil society organizations I cofounded in Brazil with my team.

And I can assure you that it's possible to mix up these ingredients

and do a good recipe

where you're going to take people that are just individuals, spectators,

and bring them to a side where they can find themselves

as change makers, as solvers, as citizens.

And especially we do this better when we design a journey that is simple,

fun, meaningful and tangible.

Creating safe spaces where people really feel that they belong

and that we can embrace mistakes as part of the process.

And here are the kind of things that you can see possible

after being trained for citizenship.

You can teach other people about the political knowledge

that you just acquired.

You can put people to dialogue,

facilitating conversations about tough topics

where people are going to broaden their tolerance and open their minds.

You can do awareness campaigns

to put emphasis

and spreading messages that are relevant for you.

You can monitor the government

and work with it as peers to improve your society.

You can formulate local diagnosis of public problems

to understand your city gaps,

and put in practice the civic empathy that I just told you.

You can use these city gaps to create public policies from scratch

using our methodology, for example,

that is free and available for everybody online.

Telling people what is the life cycle of a public policy.

You can take your ideas as public policies

and advocate in your municipality,

doing some kind of lobby to see your ideas coming through.

And that's precisely the spotlight that I want to put here,

because we all were taught that the state,

the government has this monopoly of building these public policies.

And everybody here can be a policymaker, not just policy takers.

Magda and Vitor, for example,

developed a public policy where they created a mobile application

to help the elderly to find their rights really easily

and also access to basic services in their municipality.

The proposal was approved by the city council,

and it's just awaiting for the executive branch to approve the budget.

They did that from scratch.

Secondly, we have Rafael.

That, in the other hand, created the skateboarding week.

Besides being an Olympic sport now,

it's really important for kids in Brazil to have better opportunities.

So he presented to the city councilor,

they approved and it's happening in his town now.

Finally, we have Folashade.

She just presented a public policy

to stimulate the cultural tourism in her region,

putting the original and traditional communities

into the center of the process

of creating courses and experiences to the tourists.

The proposal hasn't been approved yet,

but has been presented.

The first step has been taken.

We must celebrate it.

If all these people, and baby Gabriel, now a man,

became citizens and are involved [in] solving public problems,

everyone can be one as well.

But the reason why I brought my baby image here

is not because I found myself beautiful.

It's because we all need to remember

that the systemic change will only happen

when we start raising our kids as citizens since the beginning.

Politics, democracy, citizenship

are not concepts that are out there that we can’t touch.

We need to feel them, we need to live them.

They are a set of values that we need to cultivate inside us

since the beginning.

It's a lifetime project.

Remember, citizenship cannot be taken for granted.

You must deserve it.

You must conquer it.

Citizenship must be earned.

See you on the other side.

Thank you so much.

(Applause)