By Marin Cogan, Illustration by Mia Angoiy
Abigail Akyea knew she wanted to give back to her community from a young age. As a first generation Ghanaian-American who grew up in low-income housing, she saw how her family and neighborhood were sometimes neglected or overlooked. The now 21-year-old, who goes by Abby, says, “I wanted to be at the good end of things, making a positive impact for people who grew up like me.”
Abby began finding new and creative ways to use technology as an Information Systems major at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She describes her passion as being at “the intersections of technology, business, and social impact.”
Working as a researcher at her school’s Office of Community Engagement, Abby decided to focus on Richmond’s lowest income communities, doing a deep dive into their demographics: the age, race, education and income levels of residents of those neighborhoods. “I analyzed the communities and their needs and I tried to pair them up with VCU’s microcredential program,” Abby says.
Microcredentials are mini-courses that can provide ongoing training and skill development and are available to both students and residents without the high costs of a full college education. Abby and her colleagues put together a list of the microcredentials that could be most beneficial for residents, and shared with the community members to get their feedback. Growing up, she says that spirit of collaborative cooperation – of listening to community members and actually hearing what they felt they needed – was rare.
“I felt like I had no voice in matters that related to my life. In some cases that could come off as inhumane. No one came to my family and me to say, ‘How do you feel about this?’” she says. “It was nice, years later, to feel like I’m correcting that mistake.”
The tech Abby received as a prize for being a finalist in the Boys and Girls Clubs of America’s Annual Youth of the Year contest, a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop, was essential to completing the project. It’s become a crucial tool, she says, as she develops her skills in cloud computing and data analysis coding at school.
Abby is just one member of a generation growing up in a rapidly changing world – and determined to make a difference on her own terms. While young voters have shown themselves to be a powerful if unpredictable demographic in recent elections, that doesn’t mean they’re tuning out: they just are finding new methods of civic engagement. Young people around the world might favor giving directly to a community mutual aid group, or to a fundraising campaign led by their favorite content creators. They might also use social media to push for corporate responsibility and sustainability, or use AI tools to research and organize an in-person event. In many ways, it’s about using technology as a tool to facilitate human connection. This is a generation using their unique perspectives – along with their creativity and tech savvy talents – to build a better world.
When technology is designed with empathy, it can help spark positive change in the most human ways and with the people all around them.
– Chris Cui, Global Responsible Tech Senior Lead, Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group
Not waiting to change the world
“Gen Z stands out because of who they are and how they engage,” says Samantha Seales, a communications coordinator at Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). For this generation, technology is the primary infrastructure through which action then happens in the real world. They have grown up in an interconnected space with tech as a natural extension of how they interact with the world, and a key part of how they plan to change it.
In a New Realities: Empathy and Technology Report by Lenovo in 2020, 73 percent of respondents said they believed technological advancements had a positive impact on the ability of young people to engage in major societal issues. Seventy-six percent of Gen Z respondents said technology had made them more empathetic both to their communities and to people whose lives are different from their own.
These sentiments align with the reasons why Lenovo is actively partnering with communities, nonprofits and research organizations. “The goal is technology that helps people do more good in the world around them,” says Cui.
Isaac Edwards, a 17-year-old student at Uplift Heights Secondary, a charter school in West Dallas, Texas, and an aspiring photographer knows why he’s different from older generations. “AI is where we have an advantage in my generation because we’re growing up with this,” he says.
Even though he’s a teenager, Edwards has already served in multiple leadership roles, as a student body president at his school and as a youth leader in his church community. He’s already experimenting with creative ways to use AI both as a tool for brainstorming ideas in the classroom, and thanks to programs like Tackling STEM, a joint annual event hosted by Lenovo, the Dallas Cowboys, and The Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas. This summer, he and other students learned about how the team uses AI-powered tech to track player speed – and then tried the tool out for themselves.
AI is where we have an advantage in my generation because we’re growing up with this.
– Isaac Edwards, student and an aspiring photographer
New tech tools, new approaches
To Edwards, technology, creativity, and change-making aren’t separate, siloed categories. They can be combined and remixed in creative ways, to solve problems and imagine a better future.
The tools available to Gen Z are crucial to shaping their work. “It might start with capturing an idea in the moment, then turn it into something like music or content using whatever tools fit their flow, across phones, tablets and laptops, including devices like the Motorola Razr Ultra and Lenovo Yoga AI laptop,” says Cui. “Regardless of the device, what matters most is how seamlessly everything works together to match their creative flows.” The work can happen on an individual scale, but increasingly, it’s leading to larger efforts for change – and reshaping cultural and educational institutions in the process.
In Brazil, for example, the Instituto Escola Criativas, or the Creative Schools Institute, is working with schools and teachers to re-imagine learning environments that place student-led creativity, experimentation, and innovation at the center of the learning process.
“Many Gen Z students feel that what they learn in the classroom has little to do with their lives or with the world around them. At the same time, they are deeply aware of social, environmental, and community issues, and they are much more vocal about these concerns than previous generations,” says Ana Beatriz Bretos, 29, director of Strategy and Institutional Development at the Institute. “We encourage projects where students learn curricular content while working on real problems in their communities, researching, prototyping solutions, collaborating with peers, and presenting their ideas.” As a part of their efforts, the Institute is partnering with Lenovo on a project with educators to explore how AI can be useful as a planning and creative tool.
Bretos says technology can be a powerful facilitator. “What we see in schools is that when students are invited to use technology as a tool to investigate real issues, tell their own stories, and co-create solutions, it becomes a powerful lever for engagement and learning,” she says.
Using digital tools to connect and express themselves, she notes, is something that Gen Z already does well. Isaac, for example, hopes to someday become an intellectual property lawyer and find a way to give back to young people in his community and promote mental health. For Abby, it means building a corporate career that uses her skills in cloud computing and other areas, while also continuing to lift up the community where she came from – and the world beyond. It also means staying open to new technology that can help her make the world a better place.
This kind of experimentation is how Abby and other young people will continue to expand the boundaries of what is possible. “Technology pushes me outside of my comfort zone to learn something new,” Abby says, “It helps me really think beyond borders and to be creative too.”
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