I can change the world

So, many of you will have been at uni for a week now and everything will be getting a little easier – if you’re a fresher you’ll know the difference between the U1A and the U1C, if you’re a second year you’ll still be enjoying several nights out a week, and if you’re in any higher year you’ll have already selected your seat in the library which will remain yours for the rest of year (floor three, by the tree, just saying...).

Regardless, I think for everyone it’s starting to feel natural, like we never left. And like I said, we’re all starting to settle into our routines and this year I did not want to trudge along doing what I always did. This year I joined the University’s global health society, Medsin; a ridiculously interesting society which hosts amazing talks by a number of inspirational people in the field of development, poverty elevation and of course, health equality.  Earlier this week I went to the first one of their talks, it was called How students can change the world.

Within 40 minutes my preconceptions and estimations were blown, I was listening, enraptured, to this guy who had been at Southampton, my very university, only last year. His name was Danny Hutley, and he was changing the world. There were several reasons why this presentation was so impressive:

1.) The things being said were momentous
2.) The technological design of it was very clever, and as a bit of a technophobe I was in awe, and
3.) Honestly Danny was just an enthusiastic good guy and somehow the culmination of all this was mesmerising.
He graduated as a doctor, practised for a matter of months and now works for Change.org, whose mission statement follows: "Empower anyone, anywhere to start, join, and win campaigns for social change."
Pretty massive stuff.

It was great to hear about how Danny campaigned strongly enough, whilst at university, to affect the UN policy on climate change. Or how Change.org had provided a platform for Molly Katchpole, a 22 year old nanny to start a petition asking Bank of America and their CEO Bryan Moynihan to drop its unexpected new $5/month banking fee – 300,000 signatures and less than a month later, Bank of America announced the removal of the new banking fee.

Barack Obama even signed the petition!

And you think to yourself, that’s great, really super, but that would never happen to me… except it happened to Danny and he was a student, he even went to the same university as me, so if he can do it I guess I can too. Our world is changing; events like the Arab Spring are not isolated. We have power at our fingertips, the internet is a mighty tool and if we have enough passion we can tell the whole world our story.
So I wanted some more practical advice; a step-by-step guide to how I could change the world. Such intuitive assistance was given.

There were these 3 steps:
1. Open out information – blast it out there and make it accessible.
2. Establish a connection – talk about the things you’re passionate about with friends who are similarly passionate, they’ll share it with their friends and before you know it you’ll have a worldwide phenomenon.
3. Start small, start local – Don’t immediately try and infiltrate it from the top, mobilise your friends so they can mobilise their own and so on...

It seems simple right, if you care about something enough you can get it out there – the world isn’t as big a place as it used to be, I have friends on Facebook who live all over the world, if they see something my friend has told me about, and they tell their friends, we’ve instantly spread it across the globe. With figures showing a lack of trust in large companies and governments (big surprise right...) people are turning to other sources – we are the 99% and now we can get our voices heard.
This talk got me so energised, it’s refreshing and so important to remember that despite being a tiny person in a massive world we have power, we can demand change.

It was a good thing for me to try something new because guess what I learnt: I can change the world.

Florence