STORIES FROM YOUNG PEOPLE ACROSS THE GLOBE

I recently spent nine months traveling up mountains and along coasts to investigate why and how young people are choosing to farm for a living in Calabria, a southern region of Italy known for having lots of land but increasingly less people and even fewer jobs. I met...

PhotoCredit: Lawrence Baganiah.  In the early years following Rwanda's independence in 1962, the job market was more accessible for high school graduates. This was due to the small population of Rwanda, as noted by Trading Economics, and low literacy rates as shown by...

Last fall, I moved to southern Italy—a big jump for someone who had never left the eastern side of the North American continent. I had graduated in May and was beginning the Fulbright Scholarship to do independent research with a university in Calabria. I moved to the...

Like most young people involved in activism, I have too frequently heard the dreaded phrase that reduced my passion to naiveté: “Just wait until you enter the real world.” Back in my early days of advocacy, I told myself I would never allow my hope to fall victim to...

PhotoCredit: Yelena Odintsova.  I couldn’t help but scroll back to the image I just passed on Instagram. I was looking at a graphic of a brown sole coming down on, as if wanting to stomp and crush, a person. ‘BEYOND INDIVIDUAL BLAME’, read the graphic, with a...

Author’s note: The interview has been condensed to fit.  I was once a student on a college campus, and I’ve been around people like Perry Dripps, the Sustainability Engagement Program Coordinator at the Penn State Sustainability Institute that worked to empower...

PhotoCredit: Mike Jones.  Author’s note: The interview has been condensed to fit.  In July, I came across an article in The Guardian about the eco-gender gap, which essentially speaks to the ways that saving the world, at least on an environmental level, is deemed to...

PhotoCredit: Black Light Media.  If there is anything that has made me pause a few times this week, it is the photograph taken by Konstantinos Tsakalidis that’s circled mass media as well as social media. An old woman with wildfires raging behind her in the village of...

PhotoCredit: Mido Makasardi ©️.  The day after George Floyd’s murder, the neighborhood residents around S. Carrollton Ave. in New Orleans began their daily nine-minute silent protest, as silent as a protest can be with the St. Charles streetcar rumbling down the...

PhotoCredit: Mikhail Nilov.  “Since the beginning of 2020, I have submitted 700+ job applications-” I stopped reading the Facebook post written by a friend I made in graduate school where we were working towards a master’s of public health a few years ago. I exited...

PhotoCredit: Pavel Danilyuk.  The evening the pregnant woman stopped me a block away from my apartment in the French Quarter was a typical early pandemic evening. There were only a few people walking or running around, some cycling. The sun was setting, painting the...

PhotoCredit: ready made.  I do not know about the places where you live, but in Denmark, where I live, it seems another trend of clothes or food or technology or whatever swoops over the country every three months. Last winter, in a turn of events, that to me, seemed...