Forms
There are three main forms of youth activism. The first is youth involvement in social activism. This is the predominant form of youth activism today, as millions of young people around the world participate in social activism that is organized, informed, led, and assessed by adults. Many efforts, including education reform, children's rights, and government reform call on youth to participate this way, often called youth voice. Youth councils are an example of this.
The second type is youth-driven activism requires young people to be the primary movers within an adult-led movement. Such is the case with the Sierra Club, where youth compel their peers to join and become active in the environmental movement. This is also true of many organizations that were founded by youth who became adults, such as SEAC and National Youth Rights Association.
The third type is the increasingly common youth-led community organizing. This title encompasses action which is conceived of, designed, enacted, challenged, redesigned, and driven entirely by young people. There is now global initiative by youth in international movements, such as in the International Youth Rights, the first entirely student-run, non-profit, non-political, international movement organization, which was founded in 2009 by Seung Woo Son, a South Korean youth living in China. Working closely with Ms. Kim, the Director for Education Development at UNICEF Korea, the organization strives to make the youth’s opinions, experiences and their suggested solutions to the world issues be heard across the world and to actualize their solutions in real life, for all to realize what youth can do to make an impact in the world. The World Federation of Democratic Youth is also another international movement, which has UN NGO status. I final example is the iMatter Movement, an entirely youth-lead environmental advocacy organization.
Read more about this topic: Youth Activism
Famous quotes containing the word forms:
“I regret the unhappiness of princes who are slaves to forms and fettered by caution.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.
Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)