Civic Involvement Series - I. Youth Activism

Hello my dear readers,

Welcome to my first blog. In this blog series, I will discuss some topics about civic involvement because I believe that social projects are as important as academic education to grow an educated person. To create social projects, firstly, teachers should know civic involvement and they should teach it. Today, our first civic involvement topic is "Youth Activism". According to my observation, the world of activism is understood as an anti-government action so youth activism is generally defined as an anti-government action that occurred by a youth person. Because of this, in our country, when young people express their opinions on a problem, they are exposed to reactions such as "Will you fix it?", "Are you the state?", "You cannot change anything so you keep your opinion to yourself". However, this view is totally false. Youth activism really means the action that young people do to take action about a specific problem in their environment and solve that problem. So what or who is it that makes us think so wrong? Maybe, someone is afraid of the power of the youth and creates this wrong meaning for youth activism.

Mr. Sam talked about youth activism in TED Talks and he mentioned the power of youth activism. I couldn't agree more with this idea because we can see lots of examples about that. Most of the

biggest examples is Greta Turnberg. When the world hears her name, she was only 16 years old. She thought that climate change is the biggest problem in the world and she also observed no one gives enough importance to this problem. Therefore, as a 16-year-old young girl, she was seen in the news while sitting alone in front of the Swedish parliament. As a 16-year-old young girl, she was seen in the news sitting alone in front of the Swedish parliament. She organized official actions for climate change. She then spoke sternly in front of parliament by dragging more than 60000 people before sailing from Sweden to New York on a zero-emission sailboat. With these actions, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in March 2019.

What's more, in Mr. Sam's speech, he has also shown that youths can support something without any protests thanks to advocacy projects. In my opinion, this view is very vital for our society as I mentioned before. Our society thinks that youth activism means to make a protest government. However, as Mr. Sam mentioned, we can see some examples to prove that this situation is possible. Marlin Dias is one of the most effective examples. When she was only 14 years old, she recognized that the main characters of all books are either white boys or animals. Dias who disturbed by this situation began to question: Why books with black girls as the main characters are not available? To alleviate this discomfort, she started the #1000blackgirlbooks campaign to collect 1000 books and donate them to her peers. The campaign received a lot of attention and she was honored on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Then, to tell his story and inspire others, she wrote the book that title is "Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You!"

As I come to the end of my first blog, I want to say the following; Always believe in the power of young people and encourage them to solve the problems they face. Remind them at every opportunity and remember that young people are the most effective people who can solve problems on this Earth.

See you on the next blog. Take care of yourselves

Sena Ölçer

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