20 Under 40: Young Shapers of the Future (Social Activism and Politics)
The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner, and, if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future” work in many fields and endeavors, embracing every corner and intersection of health and medicine, science and technology, and business and entrepreneurship. They are people of ideas, framing the intellectual questions and concerns that will guide future thought. They are scholars, builders, designers, architects, artists, teachers, writers, musicians, and social and political leaders. While under the age of 40 (as of January 2023), the 200 shapers of the future that we highlight in this series have already left their mark on the present, and we expect to see much more invention, innovation, creation, and interpretation from them in times to come.
Here, in our Social Activism and Politics category, we have profiled, in the past, such familiar young stars as Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and environmental champion Greta Thunberg. We now highlight some less familiar names nonetheless making headlines around the world.
Gabriel Boric (36)
Born in Punta Arenas, a city in southernmost Chile, to parents of Croatian and Catalan descent, Gabriel Boric studied at the British School there. He moved to Santiago, Chile’s capital, to study law in 2004, but although he completed his coursework in 2009 he never practiced law. Instead, swept up in reform politics, he became a leader of a student movement that demanded increased state support for education, which had been largely defunded during the years of the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. A democratic socialist with centrist tendencies, Boric progressed from student leader to member of Chile’s Parliament, to which he was elected in 2013. In 2018, he announced to his more than 1.5 million social media followers that he was seeking treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. The announcement did nothing to diminish his popularity, and when he ran for the nation’s presidency in 2021, he was elected in a landslide, the youngest president in Chile’s history and with the most votes ever cast for a candidate for that office, earning 55 percent of the vote. Tattooed, bearded, and customarily clad in flannel shirts, he is now working to reform Chile’s tax code and to provide better funding for education, mental health care, and other social services, having vowed to “reimagine the left” to move beyond doctrinaire solutions to the nation’s complex problems. He has signaled his seriousness to do so by, among other things, appointing members of the “establishment” and opposing parties to posts in his government and taking official public stances against authoritarianism in its various forms, from the communist dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Achaleke Christian Leke (31)
Born in Kumba, a city in southwestern Cameroon, Achaleke Christian Leke saw the effects of violence firsthand growing up. He was a member of a gang in his neighborhood, and the broader region in which Kumba is located was experiencing violent conflicts. As a student, Achaleke joined an organization called Local Youth Corner Cameroon, which works toward peace building and resisting violent extremism. He developed training materials that have been used by more than 20,000 young people worldwide, particularly in West Africa. When coronavirus struck the continent, Achaleke discovered, as many others did, that necessary supplies were difficult to obtain, one of them being hand sanitizer. So, using the World Health Organization’s recipe for making homemade hand sanitizer, he launched a “One Person One Hand Sanitizer” campaign to make and distribute sanitizer for free to people on the streets while also educating them about the dangers of the virus and what they could do to make themselves and their families safe. To institute the campaign, he organized a coalition of young biomedical scientists and Prison-Preneurs (former inmates who were trained in various vocational and entrepreneurial skills while incarcerated). Earning an M.S. in conflict security and development at the University of Birmingham, Achaleke has been widely acknowledged and honored for his work with the United Nations, World Bank, African Union, and other entities.
Shamma Al Mazrui (28)
Born in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the daughter of a prominent investment broker, Shamma bint Suhail Faris Al Mazrui attended an international school in her native country, learning English, French, and Mandarin. She then received a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance from the Abu Dhabi campus of New York University, followed by a master’s degree in 2015 from the University of Oxford, where she was the first Rhodes scholar from the United Arab Emirates. She worked in finance before entering politics, serving as a diplomatic aide in the United Nations and in her country’s embassy to the United States. At the age of 22 she was appointed to the cabinet of Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed ibn Rashid Al Maktoum, serving as minister of state for youth affairs. That appointment earned her another distinction: the world’s youngest government minister. In her work, she focuses on youth issues and organizes conferences on climate change, educational policy, and other topics.
Mohammad Manan Ansari (~26)
Located in northeastern India, the state of Jharkhand is a leading producer of minerals. Born in a small village there, Mohammad Manan Ansari is one reason why that industry flourishes: pressed into labor at the age of seven, he was forced to go nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) below the earth’s surface to mine mica, working 12 hours a day in temperatures of more than 120 °F (50 °C)—and that after walking 5 miles (8 km) from his home to the mine site. He was rescued by an anti-child labor organization at the age of nine and educated at a distant Hindu ashram, where he was given a remedial education before enrolling in school. At the age of 14 he spoke before a meeting of the International Labour Organization in Geneva about the plight of child laborers. In 2018 he completed a bachelor’s degree in life sciences from Delhi University. He continues to serve as a spokesman against the practice of child labor in the developing world.
Benji Backer (24)
Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Benjamin Backer grew up in a household headed by parents who were passionately interested in nature—they belonged to organizations such as the Audubon Society—while also being involved in conservative politics. Benji, as he is known, shares those concerns. While still in high school, he campaigned for Scott Walker, a Republican who was governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019. His interests shifted somewhat when, after his first year in business school at the University of Washington, he founded the American Conservation Coalition. “I grew up not thinking that the environment should be political at all,” he told NPR. Even so, Backer and the members of his organization hope to put the conservative political movement on the side of conservation and sustainable environmental policy while honoring other free-market tenets of the conservative platform. For example, he argues that the U.S. government should not try to impose environmental legislation on other countries but should instead focus on developing clean and renewable energy strategies that other countries might be eager to adopt. In the fall of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he toured the United States in an electric car to advocate for his cause among voters.
Jasilyn Charger (25)
Raised on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, Jasilyn Charger is the granddaughter of a renowned leader of the Sioux people. While a student at Eagle Butte High School, she became involved in the environmental activism that would produce the Native American protests at Standing Rock, a Sioux reservation spanning South Dakota and North Dakota that lay along the intended route of an oil pipeline. In 2017 Charger was one of a group of people who ran 2,000 miles from Standing Rock to Washington, D.C., to deliver a petition against the project to the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers. She founded the One Mind Youth Movement and the International Indigenous Youth Council. She explains these organizations as being part of a long tradition: “It’s because we feel the power of our ancestors,” she told Democracy Now!. “They laid down their very lives so I can be here today.…And we feel, as the youth, we need to make that same type of commitment for our youth.”
Agnes Chow (25)
Born in Hong Kong into a Roman Catholic family, Agnes Chow held dual Chinese and British citizenship until 2018, when she renounced the latter in order to run for political office. While attending a Catholic high school, she was inspired by the Umbrella Movement, which protested Chinese oppression of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement and which she saw as an extension of her faith. She led youth protests and cofounded a political party called Demosisto, which advocated for a multiparty electoral system in Hong Kong. Arrested by Chinese authorities in 2019 for participating in what was deemed an illegal assembly, she was briefly detained. She was arrested again in August 2020, and she was imprisoned until June 2021. Though released, she faces the threat of being deported to the Chinese mainland and tried for national security crimes, which could subject her to a long term of imprisonment. Fluent in Cantonese, English, and Japanese, Chow has a large following in Japan as well as in Hong Kong and other parts of China. Her followers call her “the real Mulan,” a reference to the heroine of Chinese legend.
Mari Copeny (14)
A resident of Flint, Michigan, Mari Copeny was eight years old when the city switched water sources without providing proper treatment for water from the polluted Flint River. The water available to consumers was full of bacteria and industrial waste, including high levels of lead. Copeny sent a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama asking for help, even though, she added, “My mom said chances are you will be too busy with more important things.” The president came to her instead, authorizing $100 million for a cleanup campaign and drawing national attention to the crisis. Copeny has since become a representative of the United Nations Girl Up Initiative and raised half a million dollars to purchase more than 15,000 backpacks for Flint schoolchildren. She also launched an anti-bullying campaign and distributed more than one million bottles of water to Flint residents. “When I’m president, I’ll make sure I use my voice to speak for the people,” she told O, the Oprah Magazine, “especially kids.”
Marley Dias (17)
Born in Philadelphia and a resident of West Orange, New Jersey, Marley Dias was 11 years old when she complained to her mother that she was tired of being required to read books in school about “white boys and dogs.” Her mother, an activist with a doctorate in sociology, challenged her to do something positive about it. Dias—whose given name honors the reggae artist Bob Marley—first organized a drive to send to Jamaica 1,000 books whose protagonists looked like her. The resulting organization, #1000BlackGirlBooks, is dedicated to locating and distributing young adult novels with strong, positive Black women at their center. Still in high school, Dias explained to Elle that her interest lies in social action, which “means that you find an issue in your community and you create an initiative to solve that issue or to help people.” She has made many media appearances as an activist committed to helping young people—and she has gathered not 1,000 but more than 12,000 books to date, as well as writing one of her own, Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You!, published by Scholastic Books in 2018.
Sage Dolan-Sandrino (20)
Raised in suburban Washington, D.C., Sage Dolan-Sandrino sensed early on that her gender assignment at birth did not match her reality, and at age 13, after being bullied in middle school, she began to advocate for transgender rights and emerged as a prominent activist for LGBTQ young people of color. “I knew then I had to not only stand up for myself, but for other kids whose identities were under constant attack,” she told The Root. While in high school at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, she was appointed Ambassador to the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under the Barack Obama administration, and she helped draft federal guidelines for protecting transgender students from discrimination. She also served on the Aspen Institute’s Youth Commission on Social and Emotional Learning. She has taught theater to children in the Washington area. Having written numerous commentaries for the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and other publications, she now attends Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, studying film and electronic arts.
X González (22)
Emma González was a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a former student went on a shooting rampage there in 2018, killing 17 people and wounding 17 others. In the days after the attack, González joined with other students to speak out against gun violence as part of a movement they called Never Again. Together they focused on criticizing political inaction by members of state legislatures and Congress who had received contributions from the National Rifle Association. Never Again evolved into March for Our Lives, a nationwide movement. A nationally recognized activist for gun control, González has been credited for the tireless advocacy that led the Florida state legislature to enact a law raising the legal age to buy a firearm to 21 as well as preventing mentally ill persons convicted of certain crimes from owning firearms at all. González went on to attend the New College of Florida, in Sarasota. In 2021 González announced they were adopting the name X in place of Emma.
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim (38)
A member of the Mbororo ethnic group of southwestern Chad, Hindou Ibrahim grew up in a pastoralist community dependent on the waters of Lake Chad for its livelihood and indeed the lives of its people. The lake has declined by 90 percent in Ibrahim’s lifetime, and she has taken that point as one around which to organize Chadians of many ethnic groups to combat climate change. Educated in the capital, D’Ndjamena, she founded the Association of Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad to speak to the needs of those whom she has identified as “direct victims of climate change.” While working on environmental and women’s rights causes, she also helped organize indigenous knowledge of the region, which has proven useful in maintaining local control over resources that would otherwise have been allocated, often to foreign concerns, by the central government. For her work, Ibrahim has been recognized with the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award and has been appointed as a UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate, among other honors.
Miho Kawamoto (24)
A student of international politics, Japanese activist Miho Kawamoto joined the staff of Amnesty International in 2018 as a fundraiser. She soon became aware of a little-documented facet of Japanese immigration law: although the government received more than 11,000 requests for political asylum from refugees from other countries in 2017, it granted only 28 of them. Kawamoto took this as the occasion to begin organizing young people in order to raise awareness of human rights issues. “In Japan, no one tells you about your human rights or that refugees and migrants are entitled to them too,” she has remarked, advocating that the Japanese government dramatically increase the number of refugees and asylum seekers who are permitted into the country each year. Her work with her young peers encourages them to share their opinions, experiences, and ideas about how to shape the future of their nation and the world.
Divina Maloum (17)
When she was 10 years old, Divina Maloum, a Cameroonian, founded Children for Peace (C4P), an international organization dedicated to barring the use of children in war, to resisting child marriage, and to fighting Islamist radicalization on the part of groups such as Boko Haram. She spoke out in madrassas and other schools to advocate for the rights of children to live lives free of violence. As she noted, children are the most frequent victims of terrorist attacks in her country, and they are subjected to rape, kidnapping, and many other crimes. Because many languages are spoken in Cameroon, Maloum conveys her message, in part, through the use of cartoons that she draws herself. C4P has about 100 permanent members who act as advocates throughout Cameroon. For her work, she was awarded the 2019 International Children’s Peace Prize, an honor announced by the human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Okalani Mariner (~18)
Born in Samoa, Okalani Mariner attended the Robert Louis Stevenson School there, taking a strong interest in engineering. She studies science at the National University of Samoa while at the same time acting as (in her own words) a “Pacific climate warrior,” working through an organization she founded, Lanulau’ava Student Association. The first environmental group at the school, LSA centers on climate action and adaptation in the face of climate change, which now threatens low-lying Pacific island habitats as well as coastlines around the world; these “small island developing states” are often overlooked in the discussion of how climate change is manifesting itself. LSA has carried its work into secondary and primary schools across Samoa, developing a workshop curriculum that promotes the idea of a “Green Pacific.” Writes Mariner, a storyteller and artist as well as an activist, “Climate scientists suggest that my generation will be the last to experience living in our homelands because of climate change. That is not a legacy I want our world to leave behind.”
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez (21)
Of Nahua (Aztec) descent, Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh Martinez was raised in Mexico and in Boulder, Colorado. At the age of 13 he became a climate activist, speaking before organizations, including the United Nations General Assembly, and schools about the dangers of a warming world. “Climate change is the defining issue of our time. The actions those in power take and decisions they make today will determine the kind of world future generations inherit,” he urged. He also advocates for the rights of indigenous people and has emerged as a hip-hop artist and writer; he released a book, We Rise, in 2017 and an album, Break Free, the following year. He is youth director for Earth Guardians, a group of young activists around the world. As a young activist, he has appeared on panels with environmentalists and political leaders such as Van Jones, Bernie Sanders, and Bill McKibben, and he has been highlighted in numerous publications and film and television documentaries.
Wai Wai Nu (35)
Born in the westernmost province of Burma (Myanmar), Wai Wai Nu was admitted to the University of East Yangon to study law when she was 16 years old. Two years later, her father, a member of Parliament who opposed the country’s military government, was arrested and imprisoned with his entire family. Wai Wai Nu spent the next seven years in prison until being released in 2012. A member of the embattled Rohingya minority, she went on to complete law school and then founded two nongovernmental organizations. The first, Women’s Peace Network–Arakan, seeks to establish peaceful relations with the chief contending ethnic groups in her native province, the Buddhist Rakhines and the Muslim Rohingya. The second, Justice for Women, is a network of lawyers defending women’s rights in the entire country. Having spoken before international audiences at the United Nations and other venues, she is considered to be her country’s leading peace and equal-rights advocate.
Omnia El Omrani (25)
A native of Egypt, Omnia El Omrani earned a bachelor’s degree in medicine from Ain Shams University, graduating with honors in 2021 and specializing in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Throughout her adolescence and medical training, though, she found time to build an impressive portfolio of activism, including addressing a global conference on road safety in Stockholm, Sweden, on the need to develop better standards and driver education. With a strong interest in public health, she emerged as a leader of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations, headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, which represents more than 1.3 million students in 140 nations worldwide. She serves on an advisory council for the World Health Organization on air pollution, and she is also engaged with climate change, with special attention to its health impacts, a matter that was brought to the fore when, as an intern in Miami, Florida, she witnessed Hurricane Irma firsthand. “The reason I want to become a doctor is to help people and protect their health,” she wrote. “How can I do that without taking environmental health and climate change into account?”
Greta Ríos (~38)
A native of Mexico, Greta Ríos describes herself as an “activist for a better world.” She earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the Institute of Technology and Higher Studies of Monterrey, then went on to earn a master’s degree in law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. After interning in the Mexican delegation to the UN Council on Human Rights in Geneva, she became an official in Mexico’s interior department, working closely on refugee issues. She also worked for Reforestamos (Let’s Reforest), an environmental organization in Mexico, before founding Ollin, a Mexico City-based national NGO that works to promote youth participation in politics and environmental and social causes. “The greatest threats to democracy are indifference and ignorance,” she told an interviewer, but she points to her successes with Ollin as signs of progress. “The way I see it,” she says, “a single informed citizen can change the course of history.”
Emma Inamutila Theofelus (26)
Born in Windhoek, Namibia, in 1996, Emma Inamutila Theofelus took an early interest in politics, becoming junior mayor of the nation’s capital city and deputy speaker of the nation’s Youth Parliament as a young teenager. On graduating from the University of Namibia with a degree in law in 2019, she worked as a lawyer in the Ministry of Justice. At the age of 22, she ran for and won a seat in Parliament proper, the youngest woman in Namibia’s history to do so. In 2020, Namibia’s president, Hage Geingob, appointed her to serve as well as deputy minister of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, where she has taken an interest in women’s role in the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, this one embracing cloud computing, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. She also took a strong leadership role in communicating information about the coronavirus pandemic. Theofelus has used her bully pulpit in both Parliament and the executive branch to advocate for women to join her in politics as a vehicle for gaining leadership roles elsewhere; as she has said, “The more women that are in public office and are trusted by the electorate to be prime ministers and presidents, to be ministers, I think it is almost natural that that will trickle down to the private sector, where they can become managing directors and upper management and leaders of industry.” Widely recognized as one of Africa’s most promising young leaders herself, Theofelus was honored by the United Nations in 2022 for her advocacy for women’s empowerment and adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Namibia.