Billionaire philanthropists aren't the only ones who can change the world. Sometimes a plucky kid with big dreams can leave an even bigger impact.
These innovative teenagers attack problems with grit and ingenuity in order to fix environmental issues, cure diseases, pursue entrepreneurial dreams, and uplift at-risk populations.
If they are at all representative of their generation as a whole, the future should be just fine.
Vivienne Harr — Founder of the charitable lemonade company Make A Stand, which donates 5% of sales to end child slavery around the world.
After seeing an image of two child slaves from Nepal with stones on their backs in 2012, Harr, who was only 8 at the time, realized her mission: to end child slavery.
That was three years ago.
Today, Harr's company, the Make A Stand Foundation, has raised over $25,000 selling four varieties of "lemon-aid" and donating a portion of the sales to charities like UNICEF and Free The Slaves.
Thomas Suarez — Founded CarrotCorp, a company that develops apps and designs 3D printers.
Suarez gave a TED talk in 2011 when he was just 12 years old, showing off the games he'd been working on, including one called "Bustin Jieber," in which players try to catch Justin Bieber as he scurries around the screen.
At the time, Suarez would show off the apps to kids at his school and consistently get asked how he made them. So he started an app club, where kids could come to learn about the finer points of app developing.
Nowadays, the 16-year-old is running his own company to improve the 3D-printing industry with a printer of his own, known as ORB. The printer features a spinning disc, similar to a vinyl record player, that Suarez says works 10 times faster than any printer available today.
Memory Banda — Escaped child marriage and helped put an end to the practice in Malawi.
At 13, Banda's community was already preparing her for marriage, a local custom known as kusasafumbi.
But as she explained in her TED talk earlier this year, "I said no, because I knew where I was going. I knew what I wanted in life. I had a lot of dreams as a young girl."
She urged her community to pass a law forbidding child marriage, an effort that eventually took her to Malawi's parliament. Now the legal age of marriage is 18, not 15, and it all started with Banda's brave act.
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