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Yoruba Richen: What the gay rights movement learned from the civil rights movement

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An interview with the founders of Black Lives Matter | Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi

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The feminist movement is "an unstoppable current" | Emma Watson

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Actor Emma Watson reveals she has suffered a "series of threats" and "a baptism of fire" after becoming a gender equality activist but won't give up the fight. The actor and Global Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women speaks at the annual One Young World Summit in Canada's capital, where 1,300 young leaders have been brought together to create connections that lead to lasting impact.

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View videos made by students in support of global issues.

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You would be forgiven for thinking we live inside a huge, literal steaming pile of garbage.The American political landscape continues to grow increasingly frightening each day, as the world is forced to respond to an ever-increasing series of threats. From raging wildfires on the California coast to flooding in Sudan, environmental crises continue to thrive around the globe. With police brutality and systemic racism added as VIPs to this chaotic climate, times are extremely tough. So it would be easy to resign to these discouraging realities, especially if you're young. Afterall, young people are made fun of for every aspect of how we live. How could anyone really take us seriously if we tried to stand up for what we believe in?

But today's young people are no longer taking the guff from anyone-let alone the dinosaurs responsible for how they are living. While those dumpster fires rage on, the indomitable spirit of Gen-Z and younger millennials have made everyone take these matters seriously. Complex is excited to highlight these young voices who are advocating, fighting, and actively taking on the powers that be to stand up for what we all should believe in.

All it takes is one idea and the right mix of determination and willpower to effect change at the local level. Start with one thing you're passionate about then find small, local ways to organize and find solutions to the problem. That's what the 32 people on this list did-some starting at 6 years old. They're here to prove that no matter the obstacle, and no matter your age, you can work hard to leave behind a world that is just a little better than when you found it.

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32 Young Activists Who Are Changing the World

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You would be forgiven for thinking we live inside a huge, literal steaming pile of garbage.The American political landscape continues to grow increasingly frightening each day, as the world is forced to respond to an ever-increasing series of threats. From raging wildfires on the California coast to flooding in Sudan, environmental crises continue to thrive around the globe.

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Most Chinese political activists are grizzled lawyers, scholars and artists, one-time insiders that have been cast loose. Zhan Haite doesn't fit the mould.

Last winter, Zhan, an ambitious 15-year-old middle-school student in Shanghai, became an unlikely crusader against the country's draconian residence registration system, the hukou, a bureaucratic knot tying hundreds of millions of migrant workers to their rural hometowns.

Although Zhan attended primary and middle school in Shanghai - she moved there with her family in 2002 - she lacked a local hukou, precluding her from taking the city's high school entrance examination. Zhan was told she had two options: attend a vocational school, or return to her ancestral village, where opportunities are scarce.

Instead, Zhan decided to speak out. She organised a protest in front of Shanghai's education bureau, and posted a flurry of dissenting messages online. At first, the backlash was severe. Her family was briefly evicted. Local authorities threw her father in jail.

Yet Zhan's message was well-timed - hukou reform had recently risen to the top of the national agenda - and state-run media outlets began to take notice. Zhan was allowed to pen an op-ed in the China Daily newspaper, which ran under the headline Teen Girl Makes Case for Change.

In an interview in December, Zhan listed her heroes as Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi and Hu Shi, a prominent Chinese essayist who died in 1962. "Hu Shi once said that fighting for your rights is fighting for the nation's rights, and fighting for your freedom is fighting for the nation's freedom," she said. "A free and democratic country cannot be made up of slaves."

College freshman RaSia Khepra had always wanted to address the rampant violence plaguing his home city of Chicago - where more than 500 people were killed by guns in 2012 - but the death of his close friend is what motivated him to act.

Hadiya Pendleton, 15, was killed at random by a gunman on Chicago's South Side, a week after she performed at Barack Obama's inauguration celebration in January. Khepra was familiar with the sounds of gunfire in his neighbourhood and knew several people who had been shot, but Pendleton's death inspired him to act.

"I don't think having somebody that close to you can ever leave your mind if they've been taken in such a way," Khepra told the Huffington Post. "I do, definitely, think about her every day because I'm used to seeing her every day."

Khepra and other Chicago teenagers created the anti-violence awareness campaign Project Orange Tree, which helps co-ordinate community activities to stimulate a conversation about the causes of gun violence and is supported by the rapper Lupe Fiasco. Khepra said gun violence was often written off as a gang problem, but the issue also affected members of the community not affiliated with gangs. "I don't think a lot of the violence that's being labelled gang-related violence is as prevalent as it's being hyped up to be," he said.

Kelvin Doe was born to a single mother when Sierra Leone was being torn apart by civil war. "Her resilience and self-belief made it possible for me to be alive today," he once said. Kelvin was six when the diamond-funded conflict, notorious for the systematic amputation of victims' limbs, finally drew to a close.

Turning 17 this month, he is a personification of how the west African country is trying to rebuild and look forward. A short film about him has been viewed more than 5m times on YouTube.

Doe is a self-taught engineer of astonishing precocity. At the age of 11, he rummaged in dustbins for scrap electronics parts that could fix local problems. At 13 he made his own battery by throwing together acid, soda and metal in a tin cup, waiting for the mixture to dry and wrapping tape around it. This proved a big financial saving on batteries.

Frustrated by lack of a reliable electricity supply in his neighbourhood, Doe built a generator using parts that were home made or rescued from the rubbish. The generator also powered a community radio station that he built from recycled materials. He plays music under the name DJ Focus and employs his friends as journalists and station managers.

"They call me DJ Focus because I believe if you focus, you can do an invention perfectly," Doe said in the video on the Thnkr YouTube channel that proved a worldwide hit.

He had never been more than 10 miles from his home in Freetown until he won a national schools innovation competition and was picked last year for a trip to America, where he spoke at the Meet the Young Makers panel at the World Maker Faire in New York.

Doe became the youngest ever "visiting practitioner" with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) International Development Initiative. He presented his inventions to MIT students, took part in research and lectured to engineering students at Harvard College. He has been featured on CNN and NBC News and was a speaker at TEDxTeen.

His mentor David Sengeh, a PhD student at the MIT media lab, said: "The inspirational effects of the original Thinkr YouTube video have been remarkable. It has had a tremendous impact on Kelvin's life, on my life and on millions of people all over the world everywhere. In Sierra Leone, other young people suddenly feel they can be like Kelvin."

While most Brazilian teenagers are interested in computer games, homework, football or baile funk, Rene Silva has dedicated himself to fighting negative stereotypes about his favela community.

He set up his first newspaper at the age of 11, live-tweeted a police raid on his neighbourhood at 17 and has just completed his first book at the age of 19.

The shanty towns of Rio de Janeiro were long seen as violent no-go zones run by armed drug gangs, But Silva has used social media to show a more sympathetic, complex and hopeful side.

"The important thing about being young and doing what I do in the favelas is to create new points of reference," he said. "In the past, it was drug trafficking. Today, there is more recognition of the people who are trying to do good and change the reality of the place where they live."

Conscious of the shortcoming of the mainstream media, one of his teachers asked him to set up a community newspaper in 2005. At first, his family were doubtful about what he could achieve. His mother would scold him for getting home late from school because he had spent so long reporting and writing for Voz das Comunidades (Voice of the Community).

But he became the focus of every media organisation in the country five years later when he live-tweeted a huge military and police operation to "pacify" the Alemão favela where he lived. Silva's microblog corrected mistakes made by TV reporters and raised warnings about a young boy who was caught in the crossfire between the police and gangsters. HIs followers jumped from a few hundred to tens of thousands and his newspaper - now largely online - secured sponsorship.

Still not 20, Silva published a book this August, A Voz do Alemão, about the residents of his favela, which he hopes will further change perceptions of Rio's shantytown communities and expose the problems they continue to face after pacification.

Jack Andraka, 16, is the most recent grand prize winner of the Intel international science and engineering fair - where he unveiled an inexpensive way to detect pancreatic cancer.

At the age of 14 the Maryland boy investigated the disease after it had killed a close family friend, and found that it spreads rapidly and is rarely detected in its early stages. It is estimated to be the 13th most common cancer in the world and the eighth most deadly.

To try to fill the void of low-cost, quick, early-screening methods, Andraka emailed professors at nearby research institutions with a proposal and budget for research. Andraka said he contacted 200 researchers and one accepted the offer - Dr Anirban Maitra, professor of pathology and oncology at Johns Hopkins University.

With Maitra, Andraka conducted research and devised his prize-winning, inexpensive diagnostic method that can efficiently detect a protein for the cancer with 90% accuracy.

"This was a big accomplishment for me. It fulfilled my biggest and wildest dreams," Andraka told the Baltimore Sun. "But also, it means that I can actually get the word out about this deadly disease and this new test that I use to detect it."

Zea Tongeman, a 14-year-old from south London, was not a self proclaimed tech geek. "I used to think technology was just fixing computers and saying thing like: "have you tried turning it on and off again?" like in The IT Crowd," she says. But when she realised, after a Little Miss Geek workshop in her school, St Saviour's and St Olave's in Elephant and Castle, that tech could be fun and a force for good, she changed her mind. With a friend, Jordan Stirbu, she designed an app called Jazzy Recycling that aims to get people recycling by turning the sometimes tiresome task into a game.

"As Mary Poppins says: 'You find the fun and it becomes a game,' and that is exactly what our app does," she says.

Jazzy Recycling helps users find places to recycle, tells them what they can recycle and then enables them to scan, share and get rewards for their efforts.

Tapping into the teen mania for sharing even the most mundane titbits of daily life on social media, the game is then shared among friends.

Now Zea has some celebrity backing. Raj Dhonota, business consultant and an angel investor, who appeared on the Apprentice, is helping the pair build the app and they hope to launch in 2014.

She says: "To have people actually using our app and to know we have made a difference would be incredible, so fingers crossed it all goes to plan."

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Beyond Malala: six teenagers changing the world

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Malala Yousafzai, who met the Queen on Friday, has received plenty of plaudits for her campaigning, but the Pakistani schoolgirl is not the only teenager trying to make the world a better place. Guardian staff have come up with a list of six others but who have we left out?

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Early Times

People in many early societies had no rights. They had only duties that they owed to their ruler.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were probably the first people to think much about rights. A Roman group called the Stoics believed in something that they called natural law. They said that natural law gave some rights to everyone, even people who were not citizens of Rome.

The Enlightenment and Afterward

The 1600s and 1700s were a time in European history that is called the Enlightenment. John Locke of England was an Enlightenment thinker who wrote that individual rights are older than governments. In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the purpose of governments is to protect those rights. Other thinkers called such rights "the rights of man."

The American Revolution (1775-83) and the French Revolution of 1789 grew out of these ideas. The U.S. Declaration of Independence lists "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" as rights that "all men" get from God. French people wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

But even in the United States, many people did not enjoy full human rights. Slaves had almost no rights, and women had limited rights. Most slaves did not gain the basic human right of freedom until the 1800s. Women in most countries did not gain the same rights as men until the 1900s.

Human Rights Since World War II

After World War II (1939-45), the world learned that Nazi Germany had killed millions of Jews and other civilians (people not fighting the war). This crime is called the Holocaust. An international court at Nuremberg, Germany, put Nazi leaders on trial for "crimes against humanity." The Holocaust convinced many countries that it was necessary to protect the basic rights of people everywhere.

A number of these countries formed an organization called the United Nations (UN) in 1945. In 1948 the UN issued a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration calls for "human rights" instead of "the rights of man" because it includes women's rights. The declaration has 30 articles, or sections. They mention many different rights. The United Nations also established Human Rights Day, to be celebrated on December 10 each year.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights investigates abuses of human rights throughout the world. The office works with several other UN groups to protect the rights of men, women, and children everywhere.

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Early Times People in many early societies had no rights. They had only duties that they owed to their ruler. The ancient Greeks and Romans were probably the first people to think much about rights. A Roman group called the Stoics believed in something that they called natural law.

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Human Rights Heroes Recognized at the United Nations

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During the 15th Annual International Human Rights Summit, Youth for Human Rights International awards three stellar humanitarians for their work in changing the face of their nations.

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"Human Rights" are inherent rights that are believed to belong to every person, without discrimination of any kind. Challenging for adults to explain and kids to understand, I have gathered the best resources, activities, books, and lessons on human rights to help parents and teacher introduce them to their kids.

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support!

In 539 B.C., the first king of Persia- Cyrus the Great- and his armies conquered the city of Babylon. In the world's first charter of human rights, he freed the slaves, established racial equality, and declared that everyone had the right to choose their own religion. This idea of human rights spread to India, Greece, and the Roman Empire. Throughout history, there have been other charters of human rights, such as the Magna Carta (1215), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the US Bill of Rights (1791).

From 1939 to 1945, millions of people in Europe and Asia died in World War II, and millions more were homeless, injured, or starving. On December 10, 1948, global leaders joined together to declare and sign a set of 30 articles ("rules") to attempt to protect the rights of all people, no matter where they live. The document is called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and most countries in the world promise to uphold these basic rights. Unfortunately, it doesn't always happen, and many organizations continue working to try to keep children safe, healthy, and able to go to school among others.

We Are All Born Free by Amnesty International is a beautiful book for children and adults; it celebrates the Universal Declaration of our rights with illustrations by internationally-renowned artists and illustrators. The Guardian has several examples of pages from inside the book - gorgeous!!!!

I Have the Right to Be a Child by Alain Serres explains in simple terms that no matter if you are big or small, rich or poor, born here or somewhere else, people everywhere have the right to food, water, and shelter, the right to go to school, to be free from violence, to breathe clean air, and much more.

A Life Like Mine is a great book for primary school children looking at children's rights and how these rights are being met around the world. This DK & unicef book looks at water, food, home, health, education, play, protection, identity, and expression plus why these are important. Kids enjoy the stories from real children around the world. Such a great resource for libraries and teacher!

Also: watch each of these videos by Youth for Human Rights, with teens acting out each of the articles of the UN Declaration.

There are some wonderful on-line lessons and activities for teachers to easily implement into their curriculum. From comic books to games, hands-on activities to photos, even our youngest kids (preschool aged!) can learn about the rights that all humans have.

Read the UN's "Declaration of Human Rights"
UN Human Rights Education Series (multilingual)
Youth for Human Rights Education Package: " lesson plans, enrichment activities, ideas for activating the students on human rights education and a list of specific correlations of the lessons to model education standards. This is a resource for implementing a complete curriculum about children's rights in your class or school, or can be integrated into an existing curriculum."
Child-Friendly Resources from UNICEF in 60+ languages "Meena" Comic Books from UNICEF Amnesty International Teaching Guides for Human Rights Education
University of Minnesota Human Rights Resource Center Curriculum; Plus check out all of their hands-on activities for younger children.
Beautiful Poster from ACT Children's Week with all of the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Games, On-line Activities, Cartoons for kids to learn about the rights of humans from UN-RIC for Western Europe

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"What are Human Rights?" Lessons, Books, Videos for Kids

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"Human Rights" are inherent rights that are believed to belong to every person, without discrimination of any kind. Challenging for adults to explain and kids to understand, I have gathered the best resources, activities, books, and lessons on human rights to help parents and teacher introduce them to their kids.

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Social Justice For All: A Lasting Legacy | MLK | TIME

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MLK's young granddaughter excites crowd at March for Our Lives

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Emma Gonzalez's powerful March for Our Lives speech in full