Into the Digital Future: Designing for the Positive Possibilities of Technology with Jaspal Sandhu

In this episode, Jordan and Laura sit down with Jaspal Sandhu, Executive Vice President at Hopelab, a social innovation lab dedicated to supporting the mental health and well-being of young people, with a focus on equity. Jaspal shares his unique journey from mechanical engineering to youth mental health advocacy, shedding light on the intersection of design, technology, and health. They discuss the Responsible Technology Youth Power initiative, emphasizing the importance of involving young leaders in shaping the responsible use of technology. Jaspal also highlights the impact of mentorship and the need for industry players to take proactive steps toward positive change. Tune in to gain insights into building a better future for youth in the digital age.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here, and learn more about the series.

Jaspal Sandhu: I am Jaspal. I’m executive vice president at Hopelab. We are a social innovation lab and impact investor working to support the mental health and well-being of young people with a big focus on equity. That means that we’re focused on LGTQ youth and youth of color here in the United States. I should mention that I’m new to youth mental health. I’m going on just over a year at Hopelab. My own background is a mishmash of human-centered design, entrepreneurship, then health equity for the 12 years before coming to Hopelab as managing partner at a design firm that I co-founded. I did work in social impacts in Africa, Asia, and the United States. I’ve been teaching design and innovation courses at UC Berkeley School of Public Health for about that same period of time, and my roots are in (few people know this),  mechanical engineering. So I actually, if you go far enough back, I used to design welds, but I don’t do that anymore. 

Jordan: Like to get water from?

Jaspal: No, also good. I do know people who have designed those, but welds. I had some work where I was doing a kind of safety analysis of welds in nuclear reactor experiments. It sounds way fancier than it was. The experiment was fancy. My role was not fancy. 

Jordan: What an interesting background you have, really, really fascinating. And I guess, as we brought you to this point now, I’d like to dig in a little bit about what Hopelab is. Specifically, I believe it’s an initiative led by Cornell. Is that correct?

Jaspal: No, but that’s great. I love that we do interface with Cornell, though. So that’s okay. I love hearing Cornell’s name. So we’re now a 20-year-old organization. We’re a nonprofit that was founded by Pam Omidyar to really look at the positive possibility of technology for young people with a strong bend towards science and evidence. We’ve kind of gone through a few different phases of transformation over that time, but there’s some ingredients that have been there from the very beginning, that we still find very much in our DNA. I’m going to mix metaphors here a little bit. You know, one of those is a belief that technology is not neutral. and that as much as we can talk about harms. And we think a lot about the harms of technology that there is a broad set of positive possibilities around technology. So that’s one. Another is we need young people at the table. If we’re going to be something that you both believe in a lot, which is why I’m excited to be here with you. We need young people at the table, and what we’re starting to do at the Hopelab is bring young people to the table in different ways, but young people, as part of solution-making, have been part of that fabric. Now I’ve mixed 3 metaphors for your fabric ingredient and DNA. And you know the last is a firm belief in science. So you know whether that is rigorously testing the impact of products and interventions, or whether that’s actually generating new research for the field, or whether that’s actually relying on research in order to guide our strategy and what we do. Those are all things that have been common to Hopelab since the beginning. Now, the bits that are a little bit different today are that we’re squarely focused on youth, mental health, and well-being sort of in there from the beginning. But now it’s a lot more explicit for us.

Second, as I mentioned, at the top, we are very centered on equity, so, looking at youth of color and LGBTQ youth. It’s kind of our guiding star. We have a venture fund that invests in early-stage companies in the space that are doing work that we believe in, that has alignment with our equity mission. We have Hopelab Studio, and that is a little bit like my company from the before times, Gobee, except it’s internal to Hopelab and unlike Gobee, we don’t charge for services. So we are offering human-centered design, user experience. consulting in addition to equity consulting and research and impact modeling, consulting to organizations out there in the world that we think are doing good work, and we do it pro bono. And then we’ve got some activities in the research space to translate science from academia to the real world, so that all of that is really finding really good people out there who’ve already figured out a lot of this and finding ways that we can support them.

Jordan: I feel like you hinted at something we’re going to ask you about, which is, the Responsible Technology Youth Power. It seems like you were hinting at it. Can you tell us about it? Why does it matter? What does it mean?

Jaspal: Yeah. So this has been a lot of fun. It’s like I mentioned. I’ve been here at Hopelab for a year, and this was, I think, day four, I got introduced to a couple of colleagues from two organizations.

So Emma Leiken and Andrew Brennen from the Omidyar Network and Kevin Connors and the Susan Crown Exchange. So we’re three in this—Hopelab’s a funny beast because you look at us in different ways: We can look like an investor. We can sometimes look like a think tank. We can look like a product studio. But in this framework, we’re looking like a funder. And you know both these organizations have already come together to start to think about how we could support young leaders in the responsible technology movement. And yeah, how to define responsible technology. It’s tough. Because, you know, whenever we try to define the thing that ends up being like a two-page document. This is the way I see it is technology, again technology is not neutral, evolutions in technology, not just social media, but evolutions in technology over the last decade. I say, this is as much of a professional as I do as a father of an 11 year old, there are some risks, and there are some harms with it. And there’s work to be done, some work to be done in new technology platforms, perhaps some in the policy space, some in education. and responsible technology is a movement to do better, not just to reduce harms, but to really look at the positive possibilities of technology. 

Jordan: Can you be a little bit specific? Like, what are some of those harms? And how will we start to think positively about those positive uses?

Jaspal: Yeah, great question. So you know, we’re pretty recently on the heels of the Surgeon General’s advisory on social media and youth mental that I know you’re both really familiar with. That came a month after the American Psychological Association put out a similar report. You know, I think what we appreciated as hopefully about those reports was pointing out harms, but that also recognized that it’s not all doom and gloom. I mean, I’m gonna flip it back for a second. We’ll go back to harms. 

You know we’ve done a series of national surveys in partnership with Common Sense Media. And when we look again, we’ve got that really strong equity focus. When we looked at LGBTQ+ youth we found that they were using social media. I should have the number somewhere. It’s like something crazy like 98% of them were using it to seek out mental health support like they’re using it for the really positive and supportive, like in support of their own response and resilience to a pretty challenging political and social and cultural environment. In addition to being adolescents, it’s already hard enough to be an adolescent in this world. So I do want to emphasize that there is a lot of good. And there’s a lot of potential there. And that’s like, kind of as we think about responsible technology. There’s a big piece of it. That’s that. It’s like what’s working. And how can we do even more with that? You know, Harms are complex. I think both those reports pointed out something that we believe in, too, Is that there is—and I hate to say this because this is how every BBC article about research ends— that more research needs to be done. But it really is true. It really is true. That is kind of the point of research that you just keep doing. It is how you make your living, Jordan. It’s you know. I think it’s easy for us to take a look at. You can pick any chart. You can look at anxiety. You can look at depression, you can look at loneliness you can look at.

I’ll keep it there. We know that I can keep talking about statistics that are going to get way way more intense than those and they look like they map to the rise of social media and maybe smartphone penetration, but there’s other stuff that’s been happening in the world. Some of that is independent of social media, some perhaps not, right? And so things like climate stress, shifts in the economy, racism, injustice like anti-LGBTQ. Not just legislation. That’s really, I don’t know what I mean. It’s hate, right? So like all of these things. And there’s a longer list that has also been rising over that same period of time. And we’re just trying to be thoughtful about where we can actually attribute that to the technology and where we can’t and you know, I’m not trying to be an apologist for social media or big technology platforms. It’s really this that we’re trying to step into this with the kind of foundation that we have in science.

Laura: As you say, this is about young people having these safe places to go online where they can ask the questions that they might not be able to ask in the real world, or that they feel nervous talking about. Can you share a little bit about imi in particular?

Jaspal: Imi.guide is the website. This isn’t just at the tail end of our previous model, when I hope I was still building products. You know, we built them and we still didn’t build them alone. We built this, especially in partnership with the It Gets Better Project and CenterLink, which is the center of LGBTQ centers across the US. You know we have this seed of an idea that we wanted to provide a platform for LGBTQ. Young people, including questioning young people that could help to form their identities. Kind of like it’s more than one thing in a single package. But we recognize that there was an open space for there to be a resource like this that would actually serve a need. Kind of building off her mission, we had seen some interesting possibilities with chatbots and in the spirit of us having a human-centered design capability inside the group in a belief that young people should be partners in design, our team went out to all these different places. Not just California and New York, but we were working with centers in Kentucky and Alabama, and in Alaska. Alaska is interesting because we, our team, went up there and the Chatbot thing was panned. They said this is not it. This is not for us. This is not what we need, and it was not the only time that we received that feedback, but we heard it loud and clear and kind of shifted. The design of what it would be and what it has become is a platform that we still are in partnership again with CenterLink and It Gets Better are providing support for that safely and in a lightweight way.

Jordan: I want to ask a question. You’ve talked about technology not being neutral today. You keep using that word “design.” I know you had a design firm, and I know you’ve been involved in the design for health initiative, and I think it’s sort of helpful to understand it. Well, all the things we’re talking about like, what does it even mean to do something like design for help? I think it starts to get to the responsible technology question, too, like we don’t often think in terms of like, the mainstream way of thinking, at least, is not about an intersection between design and health. 

Jaspal: So great question, you know, I spent like 20 years in this space, and I think the longer I’m in it, the more I think it feels like us putting fancy labels on something that’s a very simple concept. And that is, if you’re going to build something. If you’re going to build a product, if you’re going to make a policy, if you are going to be creating some kind of service out in the world, whoever that’s for, you just got to engage them in the process. That’s what it’s like, if I had to write down what human-centered design is on the back of a postage stamp. That’s it. It sounds like common sense. It’s how most small-scale entrepreneurs across the world do their business, no matter what it is. You wouldn’t just post up at some random place and just hope that people would come to you like a good entrepreneur is going to sort of do a little bit of fact, finding they’re going to talk to potential customers. You’re going to test out the recipe with customers. They are everything related to marketing, branding, pricing like you’re going to be engaging with the community who is going to be driving. You group the revenue to you and come back to eat these things and be your best ambassadors to the world, but there’s something kind of magical that happens in organizations, and it’s not good magic. It’s when organizations get bigger. You know, we’ve worked before I came to Hopelab, I worked with a few medical device companies as an example it’s really easy to design a product for somebody, whether it’s a clinician or whether it’s at home use product and not talk to clinicians, not talk to the people that use the product. So actually talking to them, listening, testing things out with them. That’s all that human-centered design is. And so when we talk about the responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, for us it’s kind of handing over the keys to the young people. That’s really what it’s about. I mean, we set up this fund, you know, in partnership with the Omidyar Network and the Susan Crown Exchange, and we were able to bring in 11 other funders into this mix which is not always an easy thing to do. All of us do really quite different things. We’re showing up to this effort together for our own reasons, but we had this common interest in okay, well, we know that there’s lots happening in the technology space. We know that there is something that needs to be done, or many things that need to be done. Again, policy, education, new technology development, even one group that’s a publication for technologists, young technologists, but we all wanted to walk the walk a little bit more. We’ll talk about wanting to support young people. but to actually push funds to an organization that’s run by a 22-year-old or a 19-year-old is something that doesn’t happen that often. Yeah, And I go into the history of why that is. But I think you, I’m sure you’ve seen that as well. And so that’s what we’re trying to do, you know, not recklessly ourselves. We’re trying to. We know there are really great innovators out there.

Laura: And that leads me, unfortunately, to our last question. So this is going to be quite an interesting one, I think. I’m asking you to think about it. And again, it’s those sort of different stakeholders. So the big decision-makers, whether it be government policymakers or the tech industry. What three things would you ask them to think about? What’s your big, you know, if you could just go right, these guys, these are the three main priorities. What would they be?

Jaspal: You know, I think we talk a lot about policy. I’m gonna kind of have a U.S. focus here, but we see this actually in other places as well. When we talk about policy and technology platforms in the United States, it’s playing out two different ways, right? We’ve got sort of a Federal level policy and stuff may be happening there. And then you’ve got state-level policies like the California Age Appropriate Design Code, like the stuff that’s been happening around potential bans of TikTok in places like Montana. Without going into each of those policies. I think there is perhaps a missing piece, which is, we focus on big P, Policy and not enough on, I don’t know if it’s a little p, a different P policy. And that’s the power that technology platforms have themselves either as individual massive platforms or together as an industry or sub-industry to make changes. Of course, that’s being done, but I actually think that that is the place where there is such power and such potential impact. It’s, you know, if we take it to a different industry, it’s like, if Walmart makes small changes to some level of packaging in produce because of the scale that they operate at. That’s going to have a huge, you know, impact in some direction on use and waste. And in the same way platforms are touching so many young people and not just touching. I mean, this is like, when I think about young people I think, for us at Hopelab, that means roughly 13 to 25 year olds. So that’s one, sort of looking to industry for some of the answers we can offer our kind of council and support, you know, and we’d be happy to do that if it was welcome, but I think there’s actually, if we think about the impact and the change that’s going to happen. I think that’s one. perhaps, underappreciated space, and I’m excited to see what’s going to come and continue to come out of that. I think you know, not to disregard Federal and State legislation, that that will continue to happen, but that’s that’s an area. I’m excited about a second figuring out ways to put young people in real positions of power. If there’s not a video clip of that, Laura gave two thumbs up on the video part of this podcast. You know, we’ve got somebody. I apologize. I don’t remember her name, but somebody on our state Board of Education in California, who’s just turned 18, and when they announced her they announced all the members of the board, and they would say at the end, You know this person is a registered Republican. This is the registered independent under hers, and said, this person is not registered to vote I thought that was great. You know I think it’s the logical next step. It’s not happening enough. We co-hosted a meeting recently with the Arthur Blank Foundation, which also does a lot of work in mental health and well-being here in the US. In Montana, it was to bring together funders with young leaders in these mental health spaces, with the idea that we’re trying to make more of this happen, that we’re trying again to 250, not hand over the keys and walk away. They hand over the keys and jump into the back seat for the ride with these young people and this idea came up about changing the power structure like, what would it look like if young people, really young people? Adolescents were at the table making decisions about where tens or hundreds or millions, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars are going to flow. I think that could have a major impact. What would it mean if we had? And under 18, on every single school board in America? I don’t know what those discussions would look like. But I do believe that we would have a better technology future.

Laura: I’m going to summarize what you said from you know, certainly what my takeaway is. We all need to do more. And that’s, I think the simplest way is we’re seeing these really positive steps. We’re seeing things starting to happen. But we need to do more. We need to keep pushing. We need to keep going. And whether that’s as you say, from government policy people through the tech industry, through the education system and just being good adults, good role models, good parents and encouraging that next generation.

Jaspal: Yeah, something else that’s been that came up in this meeting that I was just at in Montana, and I’ve heard it a couple of other times. Is this idea; first I heard it being called reverse mentorship, and now I’m hearing it be called co-mentorship, and this is new to me, but I love it. It’s just the idea that we do have a role to play as adults and as mentors. And that’s something that I’ve done, that I’m sure both of you have been doing for a long, long time, but to actually set up a relationship where that mentorship flows in both directions between me, a not young, a middle-aged person and a young person is something. That part of this goes back to the. you know, giving young people some more power, but some of it is just learning. and that’s actually something. This is not an ask of the listeners. I’ve got a couple of people on my list that I’ve been talking to, but I’m seeking out my co-mentor for the year. Hopefully, somebody that I can provide some help and support to, but something that I know I could clearly benefit in learning from.

Laura: Yeah, I’m seeing a real movement in that area, too. I took part in a project last year with the Headstream Group. And so they did the same thing where they kind of matched us with these amazing young people, and I’m still in touch with a couple of them, and they’ve been helping us with some of our Roblox kind of workshops, and projects that we’ve been working on. And there’s a similar movement within Unicef. There’s an amazing project which we’ve just launched called Game Changers, which is about getting young women into stem and steam subjects and ideally into the video games industry. And so they are going to be matching us with young movers and Shakers from all over the world, so that we can really get that mentorship and help to lead. We really need to listen to them and hear what they have to say, and they can show us the way, because ultimately they are going to be the future, and I will be retired.