Category Personalities

Children are considered innocent and playful, obvious of the evil around them. But today, these same innocent children are standing up to speak against the menaces that plague society at large.

Payal takes a stand

Payal Jangid from Hinsla, Rajasthan, was only 11 when she almost fell victim to child marriage. At an age when her parents should have placed a book in her hands and encouraged her to study, they planned to get her married.

But Payal decided to put up a fight – she refused to be one among the many little girls who are married off at a tender age. She contacted local activists in the village and shared her plight with them. They, in turn contacted Sumedha Kailash, the founder of the Bal Ashram Trust, a rehabilitation and training centre for the Save the Childhood Movement (Bachpan Bachao Andolan)

With her encouragement and support, Payal protested and raised hr voice against her family’s decision. Eventually, her parents relented and her marriage was called off.

But not everyone is this lucky. Several girls in rural India are trapped in the web of child marriage, and Payal wanted to put a stop to this.

A voice for others

Local activists spoke to Payal and other children about the plight of their peers. They also introduced them to the concept of a bal panchayat or child parliament in which local kids are elected to a village council.

Payal was chosen as the president of her village’s child parliament, and she decided to work with the local people and the panchayat to make Hinsla at Bal Mitra Gram (a village where children are withdrawn from labour units and sent to schools) and eradicate child marriage.

She also began organizing rallies and protests with the women and children in the village, providing them a platform to voice their concerns and opinions.

Payal educated people not just about social evils such as child marriage and child labour, but also about the importance of sending children to school.

Her efforts bore fruit when her village was declared a Bal Mitra Gram. Eventually, Payal and her bal panchayat also put end to child marriage in Hinsla.

For her activism, Payal was chosen as a member of the jury for the World’s Children’s Prize in 2013, received the Young Achiever Award by Reebok, and won the Changemaker Award at the annual Goalkeepers Awards by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UNICEF in 2019.

Payal continues to work for children’s rights.

What makes her special?

Payal raised her voice for her rights and those of others around her. She worked with activists to uplift her village, and as a result, Hinsla is today a child-friendly village and rid of the evil of child marriage.

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Bali’s pristine beaches have been a tourist favourite for ages. However, the island was once laced with tonnes of plastic trash. That is until two school-going sisters decided to tackle the plastic pollution in their island.

Inspired by great people

Melati and Isabel Wijsen are sisters born and raised in Bali, Indonesia.

In 2013, when Melati was 12 and Isabel was 10, the sisters learnt about world leaders and change-makers such as Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana and Martin Luther King, in school. After this, the sisters were inspired to do their own bit to change the world into a better place.

They went home and researched on problems in Bali, and decided to focus on the problem of garbage, especially plastic bags that clogged the gutters and piled up on the beach and in rivers.

The sisters, determined to make their island plastic-free, founded a non-governmental organization called Bye Bye Plastic Bags the same year.

Indonesia-the plastic polluter

When the girls founded the Bye Bye Plastic Bags, Indonesia was the second largest plastic polluter in the world after China. It accounted for 10% of the world’s marine plastic pollution.

The Indonesian government had also pledged to invest USD one billion in reducing marine waste by 70% by 2025, as part of the United Nations Clean Seas programme.

Making an impact

After founding their organization, the sisters discussed their ideas in their class and began beach clean-ups and presentations at schools to enlighten local kids about the state of garbage in their country. The girls were instrumental in organizing Bali’s biggest beach clean-up, which witnessed close to 12,000 volunteers!

The sisters also started a pilot programme in a small village called Pererenan in Bali, educating the locals about plastic and its harmful effects on the planet. Soon, they began travelling to different countries to give talks on the subject.

However, their efforts weren’t enough to evoke the interest of the local government. To get its attention, the sisters decided to start a petition to get one lakh signatories. Their petition received tremendous response from people but the local governor still didn’t meet them,

Frustrated, the sisters decided to go on a hunger strike, inspired by a trip to India and a visit to Mahatma Gandhi’s house. And, 24 hours after they started their hunger strike, the governor met them and signed a memorandum of understanding with them to help the people of Bali say no to plastic bags.

Today, the girls continue their efforts to fight plastic pollution and have been named by the Forbes magazine as one among the top inspiring women in Indonesia.

What makes them special?

The sisters identified the problem of plastic pollution in their island and took measures to tackle it. Despite being ignored by the local governor for months, the sisters preserved and finally got the governor to sign a memorandum of understanding.

Picture Credit : Google

Music is a way of expression. Many people take to music, either as listeners or performers, in search of inner peace or to vent out their feelings.

Sonita Alizadeh took to rapping when she was 16, bringing out her first video ‘Daughters for Sale’, to raise her voice against child marriage. Now 22, Sonita continues to rap for the cause close to her heart.

What is she fighting for?

Child marriage is a social evil that has persisted for centuries. According to data released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), as of February 2019, very year close to 12 million girls under 18 are married. Nearly 650 million girls or women alive today were married as children.

While progress has been made, with close to 25 million child marriages prevented in the last decade, there is still a long way to go.

She was almost one of them

Sonita was born in 1996 and grew up in Herat, Afghanistan, under the Taliban rule. When she was six, her family fled from Afghanistan to Iran. Here, he lived her life as an undocumented refugee and a child labourer.

Sonita worked but also educated herself. She learned to read and write at a non-governmental organisation for Afghan refugees in Iran. She took a keen interest in writing and poetry and was inspired by Iranian rapper Yas and American rapper Eminem.

When she was 10, her parents had arranged for her to be married. Sonita was deeply affected by this as her dream was to receive education. She would even see her friends being beaten for refusing child marriage. Thankfully, the arrangement fell out.

During this time, she found solace in music. She started writing pop songs but realising that she had a lot to say, decided to switch to rap.

She recorded songs about being a refugee, about the Afghanistan war, and about being a young woman. But she had to hide her lyrics in her backpack as Iran had a law prohibiting women from singing or rapping.

One day, she entered and won a U.S.-based competition to write a song for a music video encouraging young Afghans to vote. Still living in Tehran, she won $1,000 as prize money.

Daughters for Sale

Sonita thought things would get better when she won the competition. However, her mother, who had returned to Afghanistan, asked her to come home as she had found a future husband for her. Sonita was just 16.

She refused to marry at such a young age and penned down a song called ‘Daughters for Sale’. An Iranian filmmaker, Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, who had come to know about Sonita, helped her to make a video and release the same. The music video garnered several views and became an anthem against the child-bride tradition. After the video gained international recognition, Sonita won a full scholarship to a boarding school in the U.S. She even convinced her parents to abort their quest to get her married.

Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami made a documentary on Sonita’s life, and released it in 2015. The film won the World Documentary Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016.

Today, Sonita lives in the U.S. and advocates for ending child marriage that has reached curriculum on child marriage high school students in the U.S. Sonita has also spoken at several forums, including the World Bank’s Fragility Forum.

She continues to write songs and wishes to be a “lawyer who can rap”.

What makes her special?

Sonita took to music and used it to raise hr voice against child marriage. Despite the constant challenge she faced, he stood her ground and is today inching closer towards realising her dreams.

Picture Credit : Google

 We often value most the thing or the person who helped us sail through our tough times. For Steven Gonzalez, that thing is video games.

His story

Steven Gonzalez, now 24, was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia when he was 12. For a chance to recover, Steven had to undergo intense chemotherapy and needed a bone marrow transplant. When the doctors looked at the international registry for bone marrow donors, there wasn’t a single match. Not one. For bone marrow to be a match, the donor and the recipient should generally have the same racial and ethnic background. Steven is of American, Italian, Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage.

Having tried and not found a donor, the doctors gave Steven a 2% chance of survival. However, they offered the family an option that might be Steven’s best shot at defeating leukaemia – cord blood transplant. Cord blood is the blood left over in the umbilical cord after birth. It has all the properties of regular blood, but it’s also rich in stem cells used to cure illnesses such as leukaemia, lymphoma and sickle cell anaemia.

A bone marrow needs to be an exact match, but cord blood gives a leeway.

A match was found and Steven’s surgery was a success. He recovered from cancer. However, his immune system had taken a beating and he needed to be in a sterile environment for 100 days. This meant isolation from the outside world.

Video game – the companion

In the 100 days that Steven remained isolated, he found solace in video games. While he was losing hair and body mass in the real world, he could be anyone in the world of video games. It gave him positivity and helped him connect with his friends. Meanwhile, he also mastered a few software.

As his isolation period was ending, he realised how much video games helped him and how it could help other children with illness. So he used his skills to create an eight-level video game called ‘Play Against Cancer’. In this game, players would fight cancer cells and overcome cancer.

He distributed the game to children in the hospital where he was admitted and realised that it helped them stay positive in their fight against cancer.

Sharing the positivity and virtually

Having witnessed the positive effects of video games on children, Steven, along with his uncle, in 2013, went on to start a non-profit called The Survivor Games to help kids out through their cancer experience. The main purpose of The Survivor Games is to “bring the healing power of video games to the cancer community by creating a social network with video games as its foundation”. It allows teens with cancer to connect with others like them and share their views on video games. It also lets teens catch up on gaming news.

Today, Steven is a cancer survivor for over a decade and is spreading cheer with video games.

What makes him special?

Steven is a survivor. He survived cancer at a young age and decided to help children fighting cancer by sharing with them the thing that helped him cope with his illness – video games.

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At the end of a grueling year at school, a vacation is what most children look forward to. However, the planning and execution of the vacation is usually done by parents, and as adults, they might sometimes overlook just how child-friendly the places they plan to visit is.

When 12-year-old Bella Tipping from Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia, returned from a vacation to the U.S. with her parents, she wanted to share her experience. She followed her mother, Bernadette, to the computer and tried to log into TripAdvisor, the travel planning and review site. However, she was not allowed to register since she was under-age. Disappointed that she couldn’t voice her views about the hotels and the places she visited, Bella decided to fill this gap in the online space by creating her own travel review website for kids.

The birth of Kidzcationz

Bella wanted to create a site where children could provide honest feedback about different things related to travel and vacation giving them a more significant role in the family vacation decision-making process.

But before she could dive right into the project, her mother asked her to come up with a business plan to ensure the idea had merit. Firm on her idea of creating a travel review site, Bella sat down and wrote the entire business plan explaining what the website was about, how it was going to work, her target audience, and her exit strategy. Moved by her commitment and dedication, her parents decided to help her in her journey towards making her dream a reality.

Bella sat with her parents and chalked out the finer details of the website for nearly a year. She came up with a name, found a web designer and made decisions on the look and feel of the website. Bella was clear that the site was going to cater to children under 18, but could be accessed by anyone.

With help from her mother, Bella also managed to get affiliated with an international travel booking site.

She travelled extensively across Australia with her parents to collect data for her parents to collect data for her reviews on the site.

Kidzcationz was formally launched in late 2015.

Safety first

To ensure kid’s identities are safe, the site uses avatars for reviewers’ profiles. It has safety features that ensure children cannot share photographs or contact information with anyone else using the site.

A successful kidpreneur

Today, Kidzcationz is a successful platform with thousands of reviewers from around the world. The site also made Bella find a place for herself in the ‘Fortune 18 Under 18’ list of entrepreneurs 2016.

What makes her special?

Bella saw an opportunity and made the best use of it. Her commitment and dedication to fulfill her dream led to the birth of Kidzcationz, and her establishing herself as a successful entrepreneur.

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It’s a beautiful feeling when one’s passion becomes their profession.

Sebastian Martinez was only five when he became an entrepreneur and started his company ‘Are you kidding?’. All because of his love wacky socks!

Never enough socks

Sebastian lives with his father Fabian Martinez, mother Rachel and brother Brandon in Kendall, Miami, the U.S. Since he was a toddler, Sebastian has had an obsession for colourful socks. His grandmother, who worked in retail, would get socks for him every time she would visit them. By the time he was five, Sebastian had more than 100 pairs of colourful socks.

One day, inspired by reading about a young girl who used her passion for design and love of sea animals to design fish-themed flip flops called fish flops, Rachel asked five-year-old Sebastian if he would like to design socks. Sebastian jumped at the idea and started designing wacky socks.

The beginnings

Soon, Sebastian wished for his designs to turn into real socks. And his mother, a publishing advertising executive, used her network to connect with a manufacturer in Guatemala that could produce samples.

In April 2014, a box full of shipment had arrived at their home. And in May 2014, Are you kidding? Was founded, and Sebastian became the chief executive of the company?

Sebastian and Rachel put up a stall at Sesame Step Children’s Shoes in Miami and decided to sell socks. Sebastian had trouble talking to strangers initially, but soon his brother Brandon, who has a knack for socialising and presenting, joined them and the three of them started attracting customers and saw an increase in their sales. That day, Brandon joined the company as the Director of Sales.

#KIDSHELPINGKIDS

Five years later, their company continues to be in business, selling their wacky socks all over the world.

The brothers also launched the Kids Helping Kids initiative, where the company partners with schools and provides tools for annual fundraisers benefiting various charity partners.

The company has also partnered with several non-profit organizations to design and sell cause-specific socks that support each organisation’s mission.

For their philanthropic work, the brothers have received a Commendation from the Mayor of The City of Miami.

What makes him special?

Sebastian made a profession for himself with his love for designing socks. Not just that, he also used his skills to partner with non-profits and raise money for them.

Picture Credit : Google