Insights
We celebrate five incredible charities created young people and children that give us inspiration, joy, and hope
Anyone, of any age, can make a difference in the world. Just take the children and young people who founded the following charities and non-profits. Their courage, determination, and enthusiasm is inspirational, and many are empowering other young people to take action and get their voices heard, too.
Amy and Ella Meek learnt about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals during their home-schooling – and it was this information that propelled them into campaigning against single-use plastic. Shocked and saddened by images of birds dying from ingested plastics, they started their mission by simply picking up plastic litter.
Their charity, Kids Against Plastic, kicked off in 2016 and two years later, the sisters gave a TEDx Exeter talk. Then aged 14 and 12, Amy and Ella talked about their approach to becoming ”plastic clever”, rather than plastic free. Their Plastic Clever positive award scheme has been adopted by over 1,300 schools and over 50 businesses and cafés around the UK.
And as well as driving forward the reduction of plastic pollution, the charity empowers its team of over 180 young people with the belief that anyone, of any age, can make a difference – a message we can all take forward.
Shortly before her first birthday, Alexandra Scott was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a type of childhood cancer. Determined and courageous, at only four years old she opened a lemonade stand to raise money to give to doctors so they could “help other kids, like they helped me”. With the help of her brother, she held her first stand later that year, raising $2,000.
Alex’s fundraising took off, with people around the world hosting their own lemonade stands. Alex died at age eight, having raised more the $1 million dollars to help find a cure for the disease.
Her family are continuing her legacy through Alex’s Lemonade Stand, Foundation for Childhood Cancer. Since the first stand in 2000, they’ve raised over $250 million, funded more than 1,000 cutting-edge research projects, created a Travel for Care programme to support families of children receiving treatment, and developed supportive resources, like SuperSibs, which supports the siblings of children with cancer. All of this from one little girl simply selling lemonade outside her front door.
When Ryan Hreljac was six his teacher told his class that people in Africa were dying because they didn’t have clean water. This hit him hard. So much so that he immediately started doing extra chores to earn enough money to build a well.
He set about speaking to anyone and everyone to raise money for his first well at Angolo Primary School in Uganda and it started drawing water for the village in 1999. Now Executive Director of Ryan’s Well Foundation and aged 31, he speaks around the world on clean water issues and the importance of making a difference “no matter who you are or how old you are”. The charity has developed more than 1,667 water projects giving 1.3 million people access to clean water.
Kesz Valdez ran away from an abusive home when he was only four, scavenging with other “street children” on the city dump in Cavite in the Philippines. Following an accident, Kesz was taken to hospital and later adopted by one of the outreach workers there.
On his seventh birthday, instead of asking for presents for himself, he decided to make up gift boxes for his friends left behind in the streets. This one big-hearted action grew into the organisation Championing Community Children (C3), which has helped over 10,000 children in Cavite with their ‘Gifts of Hope’.
Alongside the boxes of toys, sweets and clothes, C3 provides children with information about their rights, health and hygiene. At the age of 13, when Kesz was awarded an International Children’s Peace Prize, he called on those listening: “to share our hearts with the homeless and the hopeless”.
In 2007, when Felix Finkbeiner was nine years old, he was asked to do a presentation on climate change for his classmates. He ended with his talk saying: “Let’s plant a million trees in every country in the world!” And so his global tree-planting movement was born.
Two weeks later, Felix planted his first tree in his school grounds in Munich, Germany. It took only three years for the Plant-for-the-Planet movement to reach its millionth tree.
At ten years old he addressed the European Parliament, and at 13 spoke at the UN General Assembly in New York. Ten years after the movement started, he upped the goal: to plant one trillion trees.
Over 90,000 children and young people from 75 countries have been trained through Plant-for-the-Planet to become Climate Justice Ambassadors “fighting for our future by planting trees, giving speeches, protesting, and much more”.
Join us on the 14th of May for our Q&A session. It will provide a whistlestop tour of Microsoft Copilot’s key capabilities, how they can help charities, and answer all your burning questions around Microsoft’s AI service.