STORIES FROM YOUNG PEOPLE ACROSS THE GLOBE
Project Smile: On the Power of the Youth
PhotoCredit: Sam Tamayo - Project Smile History is filled with youth movements that have sparked change in the world. From the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to the events at Tiananmen Square, to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, to modern...
Empowering Africa
PhotoCredit: ROMAN ODINTSOV. I read the second edition of The State They’re In by Matthew Lockwood, a book which examines African poverty's causes and politics to propose better aid, trade, and debt policies. It also covers the 2005 Gleneagles G8 and WTO summit...
Finding middle ground: Perspectives on sustainable living in rural Italy
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...
The Rising Number of Startups: A Sign of Knowledge based Economy
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...
Being American in Calabria
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...
The work of having hope, even in the real world
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...
‘Going Beyond the Poster Itself’: The Climate Museum’s #BeyondLies Campaign
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...
Youth Empowerment & Sustainability on Campus: A Conversation with Perry Dripps
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...
Sustainable Consumption, Gender & Justice: A Conversation with Lucie Middlemiss
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...
Who will be left to warn?
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...
We Can’t Escape This: On Breathing & Social Justice
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...
The Public Health Job Market in A Public Health Crisis
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...