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Srisak Thaiarry is the leading force behind the growth of youth development work in Thailand. As a result, Thai society continues to risk wasting the talents and capacities of a considerable number of its young people. Youth from remote rural areas are expected to follow their parents pursuits, either as agricultural workers or migrant laborers, and hill tribe youth, born without Thai nationality, encounter particular difficulties in asserting their own desires and needs. This problem is particularly acute among disadvantaged populations. Commonly likened to white cloth, Thai youth are still widely perceived as empty vessels requiring instruction from adults, to whom they are expected to show obedience and deference, and they are neither encouraged nor rewarded for voicing opinions or addressing so-called adult concerns. Even today, many young people are at-risk of becoming lost resources in Thai society, due to the conventional roles assigned to them. Youth development organizations lacked partners, even among themselves, to advocate beyond individual issues and their immediate target populations. There were no collective pools of knowledge and resources, or networks of like-minded groups. In the early 1980s, the concept of youth developmentwas also new to Thailand. In addition, the needs of many disadvantaged young people, including out-of-school youth and youth in rural areas were not viewed as matters of public concern. School inspectors, for example, were legally entitled to inflict corporal punishment on students, even beyond the school grounds. Many laws affecting youth, moreover, dated back to the era of military dictatorship, when youth were perceived by those in power as potential threats to societal stability. The Ministry of Labor, for example, had little interest in regulating and preventing the abuses of child labor. Similarly, in the public sector, youth were not seen as significant constituents, and many of their rights and needs were given very short shrift. They provided young people with food, medical care, and education, but they rarely asked what they needed, or what they might do for themselves or their communities. Even within the citizen sector, many youth-focused organizations still harbored the conventional perception of youth as passive recipients of assistance. In the early 1980s, childrens rightswas an unfamiliar concept in Thailand.

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In addition, Srisak has created a series of ongoing awards, both to recognize alternative role models for youth and to change public perceptions of youth, as well as young people s awareness of their own capacities. Having long been motivated by the belief that youth have both the right and the responsibility to be active and equal partners in addressing their own and broader societal needs, Srisak has also played a central role in creating an enabling environment for them to claim those rights, including the establishment of a national association of youth-led organizations called the National Youth Council, as well as its provincial and district counterparts.

She has also spearheaded an unprecedented degree of collaboration between the citizen sector and government on youth-related matters, as reflected in joint annual reports on the state of childrens rights in Thailand. Srisak has transformed citizen organizations (COs) concerned with childrens and youth s needs from weak and isolated voices into a coalition that has played an increasingly consequential role in advocating youth-friendly reforms in public policies and new legislation. Over the past 30 years, Srisak has developed a coalition of youth development organizations in Thailand into a powerful vehicle for change that is much more than the sum of its parts. She has strengthened citizen sector initiatives focusing on youth, fostered new partnerships with business and public sector organizations, and shifted the approach of youth development work from assistance to empowerment. Srisak has long been the backstage motivator and organizer of youth development work in Thailand.

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