Olivier Gaillard

In a Belgian society where the educational system and employers place little value active citizenship and social engagement, Olivier Gaillard is uniting all key stakeholders around a similar vision of youth empowerment to profoundly transform youth years. Through unique events, peer to peer inspiration and guidance, tailored engagement choices and online and offline tools to create social ventures, Olivier is reaching into teenagers’ daily life and calling upon them to take action to realize their potential as changemakers. He is thus paving the way to a society where everyone has the empathy, the entrepreneurial qualities and the will to meet social and environmental challenges.

While 70% of 17-to-25-year-old Belgian youth claim to be interested in participating in a social or environmental project, only 12% of them have ever done so. Resolved to bridge that gap, Olivier Gaillard understands that the key to unlocking the system and engaging youth lies in leveraging school resources in terms of educational content, time and workforce, and in building on peer to peer training. More than half of a high schooler’s waking life is spent in and around school (between 32 to 36 hours per week in the classroom, 15 to 20 hours doing homework, to which one should add transportation and meals); the rest of their schedules is oftentimes split between family, friends, sports and other leisure activities, leaving very little room for social engagement, especially without incentives or recognition from schools and employers. Relying on a broad student volunteer base, Olivier is virally gaining teachers’ support, and through them enables students to enter classrooms and raise awareness around citizenship issues with pupils. Class groups are then invited to attend participatory events (FLASH, Forums de l’Action Sociale et Humanitaire) where they follow a path to citizenship in which they become actors of social change around issues of their choice and interest.

Olivier is also structuring a platform meant to become the centre for youth citizenship in Belgium, radically redefining and deepening youth social engagement. Entirely organized and run by youth, FLASH events are merely an excuse to take youth and teachers inside out of the classroom to a new understanding of the world and how they fit in, through peer to peer guidance. While high-schoolers are led through a very structured path of self-discovery by socially engaged university students, in which they experiment and discover engagement opportunities, teachers are taken aside and trained by professionals to lead citizenship projects with their students. Trans-Mission offers them a pedagogical guide and access to a network of experts to build mini-CSOs, i.e. youth-led social ventures – a completely unique tool in Belgium, where citizenship is almost completely foreign from school curricula. The intense experience of the forums will motivate youth to take action, either through one of the many partner organizations represented at the events, or by starting their own project with the help of their teachers. They will also be able to find all the information, tools, partners and more on a highly innovative 2.0 web platform through interactive maps, social change auctions and concrete participation opportunities.

By entering schools with a combination of interactive events, the launch of mini-CSOs and his web platform, Olivier is revolutionizing what it means to be a young, active citizen. He is indeed branding youth citizenship as a social trend, through word-of-mouth marketing and Trans-Mission’s positioning. His team represents a group of young, engaged students whom other youth can identify with; the notion of identity is reinforced by the interactivity of the FLASH events and of the website, as well as the merchandising surrounding Trans-Mission (T-shirts, IDs, etc.). To become part of the network and be publicized, partner organizations have to commit to the rules of youth-led engagement. Olivier has also created a “Youth Engagement Passport” to allow participants to track their activities and frame it into a consistent part of their resume.

In Western societies, children and youth are not typically empowered or given responsibilities in any part of their lives. Legally, they are bound by their parents’ authorization; in school, they are required to attend classes and deliver homework, and are demanded to obtain good grades; outside of school, they are offered a broad range of packaged activities such as sports, music or arts, through which they can participate in adult-initiated and adult-run projects. They also are a key target for consumer good producers and marketing specialists, which promote a culture of consumption and consumerism. As a result, young people develop a consumer attitude, through which they often struggle to define their own identity and scope of responsibility. While they are highly sensitized to social and environmental issues and feel that they should play a role, they do not trust themselves to take action: Only 12% of 17-to-25-year-olds have participated in a social project.

This discrepancy can seem surprising with regards to the number of citizen sector organizations which invite young people to get engaged. However, there is a deep divide between youth’s expectations and the functioning of organizations that, while seeking to mobilize young people, are led for the greater part by adults. While trying to create sustainable action, they use ill-adapted language, few internet tools, and offer little responsibility to young people, with little space to develop independent projects. In addition, these actors are not structured in a youth-centered community, and there is no centralized information source to help read through the maze of the citizen sector. The numerous youth information networks in Belgium deal with family, education, housing, jobs, and social action, but none of them focus on issues of citizenship.

Finally, while Belgium’s “not-for-profit” sector is the country’s highest-growth sector in terms of jobs created, skills gained within the citizen sector are not formally recognized in universities, institutions of higher education, or businesses. As a result, only 33% of youth believe that participation in the citizen sector helps them develop useful skills for their futures. Success still lies in “classic” career paths, and civic engagement does not appear as a priority.

Olivier sees the path to citizenship and social engagement in three crucial steps: sensitization, reflection and action. Reaching out directly to high school students in the classroom, he is multiplying pathways and itineraries for them to experience these key steps, giving them many opportunities to step into action. The main highlight of his action is the FLASH, a forum for youth social action, youth-initiated and led, in which 17-year-old students become actors of social change through situational scenarios, workshops, or role-plays (measuring their ecological footprint, how a bush hospital works, etc.); they also meet civically engaged youth and experts, see exhibits, before being offered the possibility to join a partner organization or start their own project. The FLASH events are only the starting point of an in-depth pedagogical process: teachers are equipped to support the youth in their own projects, and a wide range of partners (corporations and citizen sectors organizations) are available to bring their expertise to developing ventures.

This mini-CSO program allows Olivier to tie both aspects of youth lives together: in and outside of school. With teachers’ support, youth will be entrepreneurs and take action as citizens in their local community, triggering new attitudes from adults around them. Currently at the experimentation phase, his pedagogical toolkit has already raised interest from many teachers and garnered support form Junior Enterprise, an international organization which helps young people to create their own business within schools (450 in Belgium every year), which has committed to support the spread and duplication of the mini-CSOs. Olivier is now consolidating a wide network of experts to support young wannabe entrepreneurs. Through his partnership strategy, he is forcing other citizen sector organizations to create space for youth to be entrepreneurial within and outside of them, with their support. He is also encouraging the recognition of skills acquired through the mini-CSO programs in schools, by governments (he is heading a group promoting the creation of a national civil service) and by corporations, through the creation of an engagement passport for the youth to track and validate all of their social activities.

Two years after the rebirth of Trans-Mission, Olivier has been consolidating its key activities before expanding his reach. Currently held regularly in the Brussels area and touching 1,500 youth a year, the FLASH events will be regionalized after 2008, and then brought to the country’s provinces in 2010 – always organized by and for young people, with the goal to host more than 20,000 youth in Belgium every year. The Forum, which is unlike any other in the world, is on the agenda of the ministry of education who supports its national expansion by encouraging teachers to participate. It has also garnered international recognition: to facilitate its spread, Olivier has written up a methodology explaining how the Forum works and is organized, and it will soon be put into practice by youth for the 2008 World Youth Forum in Quebec. To strengthen his reach beyond geographical barriers, Olivier is developing a web platform with Belgium’s leading telecommunication provider to make participation in the forum accessible from everywhere and at all times, and to allow for interactions between youth based on their needs and expectations, with, for example, interactive engagement maps and pro-bono service auctions.

Olivier was raised in a family of entrepreneurs, and began taking initiative at a very young age. Interested above all in social issues, at the age of 18, Olivier decided to participate in an international aid mission. An organization pointed him to a project to support disabled persons in Ghana. Poorly prepared both emotionally and physically, the experience had disastrous consequences: within six months, Olivier lost 18 kilos (40 pounds) and was hospitalized twice. One of his students died in his arms. Deeply traumatized upon returning home, the stability he was seeking eluded him because of tragic family circumstances.

Thrown off balance, Olivier sought answers in his personal life while continuing his experiences in the citizen sector. Determined that no-one would have to suffer the same experience he had had in Ghana, he helped the organization he was working for develop a departure preparedness curriculum and training program. He also multiplied leadership experiences with the scouts and in university, while completing a teacher training program. One day, he was invited to speak at a FLASH event, and experienced it as a kind of revelation. In it, he found a platform that brought together youth seeking answers to questions of citizenship, and found himself in a position to bring answers.

When Trans-Mission, the organization owning the FLASH events, was about to fold because of poor management (high debt, undergoing a lawsuit), he took the helm and gave a new birth to the organization. He restructured and professionalized the organization of FLASH events, multiplied the budget threefold (from 50 to 150,000 euros), doubled the number of its partners, and completely redeployed its development strategy to integrate the Mini-CSO program and his web platform. President of Trans-Mission since May 2005, Olivier has been working full time with no pay and seeks advice from professors and management professionals, as well as a team of 35 volunteers that he has mobilized. His development plan won the first Prize from the Start Academy Competition from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2006. His tireless effort and the stands he has taken deserve ever-greater recognition, and he is more and more sought out in Belgium and abroad to influence the place of citizenship in educational curricula and the recognition of skills acquired through experience. His encounter with Ashoka has opened new perspectives for growth, thanks in particular to synergies between Trans-Mission and the Youth Venture program.