Known for being hormonal, moody and apathetic, teenagers don’t
always get the best reputation.
But the recent rise to prominence of 16-year-old
environmental activist Greta Thunberg has smashed all such
stereotypes and made people of all ages take notice of what she has to say.
But she is far from the first teenager to prove that young
people can make huge changes to the world.
Malala Yousafzai was only 14 when she was shot for
speaking out about the lack of education for girls in Pakistan, where she grew
up.
Nine months after the attack she gave a speech at the UN,
and she continued to campaign tirelessly for fair education for girls.
Aged 17, she became in the youngest person ever to win the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
Young people like Thunberg and Yousafzai are inspirational
for everything they’ve accomplished at by such a young age, but they’re not
alone.
More and more teenagers are standing up for their beliefs
and trying to create a fairer world that aligns with their beliefs. Here are a
few of the most influential.
It seems like the future generation may be able to solve the
world after all.
The now 16-year-old Greta Thunberg launched the school strike movement in
2018 to protest a lack of government action around climate change. She began
protesting outside the Swedish parliament and since then, more than one million
students have joined her in an expression of global unity for her cause. Now,
the oil and gas industry has said it is "listening" to the young
activist.
After a gunman
stormed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida in 2018
killing 17 people, Emma Gonzalez – who was 18 at the time – co-founded the
gun-control advocacy group Never Again MSD. The teenager organised the March
for Our Lives protest in Washington and, speaking at the rally, she delivered a
powerful speech in which she named every victim of the shooting before standing
at the podium, weeping in silence for their lives. “Fight for your lives,
before it’s someone else’s job,” she said. Florida lawmakers later passed
legislation to make it harder to purchase firearms.
In 2017, 18-year-old Amika George founded #FreePeriods to
fight period poverty in the UK. She organised a protest that saw more than
2,000 people dressed in red marching on Downing Street, and not long after the
government announced it would begin funding free sanitary products in all
English schools and colleges.
At 18, Jazz Jennings
is one of the youngest trans people in the public eye. In 2007, along with her
parents, she co-founded the TransKids Purple Rainbow Foundation to help transgender
children, and in 2013 she launched Purple Rainbow Tails to raise money for the
same cause. She has also written a memoir and launched a YouTube channel which
has 650,000 subscribers
Millie Bobby Brown, the 15-year-old Stranger Things actor is also the
youngest ever Unicef ambassador, appointed to promote children's rights. She
regularly uses her platform to highlight social issues, including the March for
our Lives and Time's Up movements.
In the run-up to the
midterm elections last year, Black-ish actor Yara Shahidi launched Eighteen x
18, an initiative to encourage young people to vote. She is also the founder
Yara’s Club in partnership with Young Women's Leadership Network , which provides
online mentorship to end poverty through education. Her activism was praised by
Michelle Obama, who wrote her a letter of recommendation to Harvard University.
Sonita Alizadeh is an Afghan rapper who rose to prominence
when she released "Brides for Sale" in 2014, after having almost been
sold into marriage twice. The song went viral and she ended up going to high
school in the US. She is currently at university in Washington, DC, and
continues to fight against forced marriage for young women.
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