Kids will be kids. Kids should be seen and not heard. Today’s youth are so entitled. They’re just kids. Blah. Blah. Blah. It seems to be so easy for some adults to dismiss kids for being kids.
But kids doing amazing things all the time.
When he was 9, Dylan Mahalingam co-founded Lil’ MDGs, a nonprofit international development and youth empowerment organization and an initiative of Jayme’s Fund. Lil’ MDGs mission is to leverage the power of the digital media to engage children in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. His organization has mobilized more than 3 million children in 24 countries around the world. He is now 15.
Alexandra “Alex” Scott was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a type of childhood cancer, shortly before she turned 1. Just after turning 4 years old, she started a lemonade stand to raise money for doctors to “help other kids, like they helped me.” Her first lemonade stand raised $2,000 and led to the creation of the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation. She raised over $1 million toward cancer research before she passed away at the age of 8. Today, Alex’s Lemonade Stand sponsors a national fundraising weekend every June called Lemonade Days. Each year, as many as 10,000 volunteers at more than 2,000 Alex’s Lemonade Stands around the nation make a difference for children with cancer.
6-year-old Ryan Hreljac was shocked to learn that children in Africa had to walk miles every day just to fetch water. He wanted to do something about it. Ryan’s determination led to Ryan’s Well Foundation, which has completed 667 projects in 16 countries, bringing access to clean water and sanitation to more than 714,000 people. He is now 20.
9 year old Katie Sagliano grew a 40 pound cabbage that she donated to a soup kitchen. It helped feed 275 people. Katie decided to start vegetable gardens and donate the harvest to help feed people in need. Today, Katie’s Krops donates thousands of pounds of fresh produce from numerous gardens to organizations that help people in need. Katie is now a 12-year-old student in Summerville, S.C.
Anne Frank was given a diary at the age of 13 which she used to chronicle her life in hiding from the Nazis. She died of typhus in the Bergen-Bergen concentration camp but her father survived and published her diary. Her diary was filled with her belief in the good of humanity even while she experienced the worst of humanity. It has become one of the most read books in the world.
Louis Braille invented a system of reading and writing for the blind involving raised dots, which today is known as Braille. At age 19, Braille became a full-time teacher at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth having already changed the world.
A 15-year-old African-American girl named Claudette Colvin had refused to relinquish her seat nine months before Rosa Parks did the same. Arrested in 1955, ultimately, she challenged this law in court in Browder v. Gayle, where “a federal court suit involving Colvin eventually led to a Supreme Court order that outlawed segregated buses.” Today she is a retiree who lives in the Bronx, N.Y.
Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen but recovered to advocate for education for girls around the world. She became the youngest Nobel Prize winner at age 17 and uses her fame to advocate for girls education around the world.
Kids do AMAZING things all the time. But they don’t have to literally change the world to make the world a better place. Here are 6 simple things that kids can do without much effort to make the world a better place. They are taken from the ideas of real kids in brainstorming sessions from the presentation, Promoting Peace.
With encouragement and support kids of all ages will do amazing things.