What We Do
We work to embed doing good in mainstream culture through our two projects Big Help Mob and TEDxPerth.
And by giving young people the experience of leading and running Youth Tree Inc. itself, we are incubating a new generation of social innovators; leaders who will have a positive cultural footprint.
Big Help Mob
Big Help Mob is a massive rent-a-crowd of ordinary young people who combine their powers to perform extraordinary feats of strength and stupidity for causes that need them.
Big Help Mob’s aim is to reach the masses and make volunteering as mainstream as cheeseburgers and breathing. By creating fun, social volunteering experiences with immediately tangible results and plenty of stupidity, we get young people “hooked” on giving back. Our ‘shut up and do it’ approach is based on the conviction that sometimes we have to just do something before we realise we care about it. Big Help Mob is working to transform volunteering from an activity only for die-hard do-gooders and activists into something that everyone just does on the weekend with their friends because it’s fun, it makes you feel good and it’s a way to be of use to other people.
So far, we have run two Big Help Mob Pilot events, each attracting 50 - 65 young people from across Perth. We have already proven that Big Help Mob can attract the “non-converted”: The two largest slices of our user base pie are people who have either never volunteered before or volunteered less than three times in the last year. Our testimonials from participants and organisations we help show overwhelmingly that we are both getting previously disinterested young people excited about volunteering and that we are seriously helpful to the causes we help.
We intend to scale Big Help Mob worldwide. Over 2011 we aim to:
- Perfect our Big Help Mob event model through three massive feats of strength and stupidity, attracting more young people (up to 100 per event) from a broader range of backgrounds, doing more good for the causes we lend our people-power to to and better measuring our results
- Begin creating a free online toolkit that will allow any other youth-led group in the world to create a Big Help Mob in their community (an un-franchise)
- Create generation 1 of a web application that will allow little help mobs to self-organise around small, real-world jobs that local non-profits need done
WEBSITE: bighelpmob.org
TEDxPerth
TEDxPerth is a monthly idea-sharing conference hosted by Youth Tree Inc. under license from TED.com, and is part of the global TEDx phenomenon.
Through TEDxPerth, we aim to grown an aware, inspired and active young generation by:
- Building a visible community of young people committed to making positive change
- Exposing our audiences to a massively broad range of revolutionary ideas that stimulate deep thinking
- Creating spaces where budding social entrepreneurs connect with people who can help grow and improve their projects
We are convinced that people will not act if they feel the world’s problems are too enormous or that they are the only ones who care, but they will if they can be regularly inspired by world-changing ideas and meet like-minded people who share their desire to improve the world. So all the talks and activities at TEDxPerth are focused on real solutions to important local and global problems, and on what’s possible and what’s inspiring, rather than the extent to which the world is screwed. Our events are structured to facilitate quality interactions between participants with common interests.
TEDxPerth has grown from a tiny gathering of eight people in a lecture theatre to a regularly packed-out monthly event that has attracted over 1000 young (and young at heart) people from diverse backgrounds in its 15-event lifetime. We now have an event where highly acclaimed speakers and countless local non-profit organisations can share their ideas with a large, captive audience of young people.
The future for TEDxPerth is exciting. We intend to grow our event in in quality (talks and workshops) and quantity (number of events and attendees) without losing the relaxed atmosphere that keeps people coming back. We want to directly engage thousands of young people in 2011 through TEDxPerth events, share more talks online with potentially millions of people, and understand more deeply what impact TEDxPerth has on our participants.
WEBSITE: tedxperth.org
Leading and Running Youth Tree Inc.
Above are some arms and legs belonging to our staff, and a lot of Lego pieces.
Making stuff out of Lego is a bit like leading and running Youth Tree Inc.; you’re using your creativity, skills and time to build something real, you’re learning a lot and it’s fun… and you should always be the first to find the pirates.
Running all functions and projects of Youth Tree Inc. itself is an unparalleled professional development experience where young people can learn the skills and qualities desperately needed in 21st century work. Youth Tree Inc. is like a factory of awesome, pumping out what our world needs: creative, entrepreneurial people with strong leadership, turbo-charged communication and teamwork abilities, strong ethical convictions and wisdom gained through real-world experience.
From organising Big Help Mob logistics, to attracting professional speakers to TEDxPerth, from accounting to graphic design, from strategic planning to writing the copy for this very website, everything you have seen of Youth Tree Inc. has been created completely by young people who you’d be crazy to give such levels of responsibility in any ordinary organisation.
Our staff are deeply impacted by their time at Youth Tree Inc. and go onto effect more positive change in the organisations and communities they live and work in.
WEBSITE: if you are not aware that you are already on the Youth Tree Inc. website, we recommend taking interweb lessons immediately. It’s a wonder you’re here at all.
