These girls are the shit.
We typically spend Women’s Day linking up to support each other and remembering the women in history that have influenced the movement significantly.
Marie Curie. Maya Angelou. Malala Yousafzai. Frida Kahlo.
But in addition to recognizing those who have changed the world, we should recognize those who are in the process of changing it.
Young women like us.
Capri Everitt
Everitt performing our national anthem at a Blue Jays game (Getty Images)
Falling in love with music at the age of five and connecting with the storybook “The World Needs Your Kid” about children in poverty, Capri brainstormed her project Around the World in 80 Anthems. Eager to help, she learned 80 national anthems in each language and traveled to the world’s “SOS children’s villages” to raise money for orphaned and homeless children.
The project has made her a two-time TED speaker, Guinness World Record holder and winner of the American Protege International Music Competition at Carnegie Hall — all at the age of 13.
Paloma Noyola Bueno
Paloma on the cover of Wired Magazine
Labeled “The Next Steve Jobs”, 12-year-old Paloma (from Matamoros, Mexico) shocked her country in 2013 coming from dump like conditions and scoring the highest national result on their version on the SAT. Learning in an environment with no running water, telephone lines or drainage inspired her to work with professors and engineers to create a new school system — especially after two of her friends mysteriously disappeared.
The system includes teaching peer-to-peer and allowing students the ability to access their curiosity.
Jennings reppin’ (Jeanine Lund/Village Voice)
Jazz Jennings
A South Florida native, Jazz has amplified LGBTQ activism to another level as a spokesmodel and TV/YouTube personality. Born a boy, she was diagnosed with “gender identity disorder” at age five and became one of the youngest people to come out and publicly identify as transgender.
At age six, Jazz had a booming platform she could use to advocate for her cause. She began appearing on television to discuss her struggle and movement and later founded the Transkids Purple Rainbow Foundation a year later. In 2011, her life documentary appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Two years after, she founded Purple Rainbow Tails, a company dedicated to raising their money for transgender children by selling rubber mermaid tails.
She’s the center of a children’s book co-written by herself and Jessica Hershel about the journeys of a transgender child and in addition to writing credentials, she has also been featured in Time magazine’s “Most Influential Teens of 2014”.
In the summer of 2015, her TLC reality TV show premiered and she wrote a memoire in 2016.
Plans for a Jazz Jennings doll were announced last year.
Penn speaking at one of her TED Talks
Maya Penn
At eighteen, Maya is an award-winning designer, artist, activist and CEO of the sustainable fashion and accessories company Maya’s Ideas she created when she was eight-years-old. The company donates 10-20% of the proceeds to global foundations that speak to her, which received appreciation by Barack Obama and his administration. She also founded a nonprofit organization called Maya’s Ideas 4 The Planet that started an ongoing initiative to design and create eco-friendly sanitary pads for women/girls in developing countries and she has shipped pads to healthcare facilities in countries like Haiti, Senegal, and Somalia. She uses her organization to teach young girls about STEM programs.
In addition to her recognition for environmental awareness, Maya was apart of creating the first ever digital report in Congress, an animated film which addressed convincing them to build a Women’s Museum in DC.
Kalyani Ramadurgam
Kalyani at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, in front of her project, which won third place (out of the whole world, c’mon)
It took a while for police to recognize the Boston Marathon bombers due to spotty camera footage. This sparked the interest of a SoCal teen that tried to think of ways she could help with a problem she thought was so simple to solve.
She realized that most regular security camera footage didn’t recognize facial features unless the person was looking directly at the camera in suitable lighting. Her alternative is a software that uses the different patterns and facial features from each angle off the footage to identify an image.
Svitak curating the TEDxRedmond conference she spearheaded
Adora Svitak
An avid lover of words, the now 20-year-old former child prodigy used them in her writing, activism and public speaking to advocate for literacy, youth voice and child hunger. After the release of her first book, Flying Fingers, she taught an elementary class that ignited an urge to continue speaking at other schools, classrooms and conferences across the globe.
She delivered a TED Talk titled “What Adults Can Learn From Kids” that attracted over 3.3 million views and exposed her to a larger audience. Pacific Standard Magazine featured Adora in “30 Top Thinkers Under 30,” going on to call her “an activist for feminism, liberal politics, and youth-oriented causes […] pretty far up the road to becoming intellectual royalty.”
Mikaila Ulmer
Mikaila holding a bottle of her lemonade (Rodolfo Gonzalez—Austin American-Statesman/AP)
From Austin, Texas, four-year-old Mikaila got stung by a bee the same day she received an old cook book from her grandmother with a flaxseed lemonade recipe. The toddler saw a sign from the universe and created Me & the Bees lemonade with her grandma’s recipe, sweetened by locally-sourced honey. She learned about the importance of bees and also donates a portion of her profits to organizations that help protect the lil stingers around the globe from environmental encroachment and other hazards.
Now a teenager, Mikaila is still making lemonade, but now the young entrepreneur is also speaking at business conferences and leading workshops on how to save bees.
Not pictured: the baseball darting by the hitter and getting caught by the umpire (Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Mo’Ne Ikea Davis
Mo’Ne was breaking gender molds when she was 13 years old as one of the first girls to play Little League Baseball. The pitcher from Philadelphia was the first African American who played in the Little League World Series as one of only two girls in 2014. She is also the first girl to earn a win and to pitch a shutout in Little League World Series history — and the first Little League baseball player to appear on the cover of Sport’s Illustrated. Her impact on gender equality is bigger, however, as she shows both girls and boys, men and women, that little girls can do whatever they want.
These are girls that started changing the world before they even entered adulthood.
They’re inspirations to us all and irrefutable evidence that when it comes to age… the limit does not exist.
