36 American child activists

Sampson Gordon Berns was an American activist who had progeria and helped raise awareness about the disease. He was the subject of the HBO documentary Life According to Sam, which was first screened in January 2013.

Zachary "Zach" L. Bonner is an American philanthropist and founder of the non-profit charity Little Red Wagon Foundation. Bonner received the Presidential Service Award in 2006.

Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American civil rights activist. She was the first African-American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis on November 14, 1960. She is the subject of a 1964 painting, The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell.

Kilee Brookbank is an American burn survivor, author and fundraiser for burn treatment from Georgetown, Ohio. She is the author of the books Beautiful Scars and Digger the Hero Dog and the founder of the nonprofit Kilee Gives Back Foundation.

Alfonso Calderón Atienzar is a Spanish-American student activist against gun violence. He is a survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and a founding member of the Never Again MSD movement.

Haven Coleman is an American climate and environmental activist. She is the co-founder and co-executive director US Youth Climate Strike; the nonprofit organization is dedicated towards raising awareness and demanding action concerning the climate crisis. She established it together with youth activists Alexandria Villaseñor and Isra Hirsi. She also writes for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Claudette Colvin is a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

Amariyanna "Mari" Copeny, also known as Little Miss Flint, is a youth activist from Flint, Michigan. She is best known for raising awareness about the Flint water crisis and fundraising to support underprivileged children in her community and across the country.

Marley Dias is an American activist and writer. She launched a campaign called #1000BlackGirlBooks in November 2015, when she was in elementary school; she noticed that the main protagonist in most stories was a white boy.

Katie Eder is an American activist and social entrepreneur who founded and has led social impact ventures 50 Miles More, Kids Tales, and The Future Coalition, the latter where she is currently the Executive Director.

Catherine Amelia Fay Ewing was an American educator, missionary, philanthropist, activist, and social reformer from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. In 1857, she took in children from the Washington County Infirmary, thus organizing the first children's home in the state of Ohio.

Homer C. Folks was a United States sociologist who worked as a social welfare advocate. He was the New York City Commissioner of Public Charities.

Cora Bussey Hillis was a child welfare advocate. Her work advanced children's health care, education, and the juvenile justice system in Iowa. She was admitted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1976.

Isra Hirsi is an American environmental activist. She co-founded and served as the co-executive director of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike. In 2020, she was named in Fortune's 40 Under 40 Government and Politics list.

David Miles Hogg is an American gun control activist. He rose to prominence during the 2018 United States gun violence protests as a student survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, helping lead several high-profile protests, marches, and boycotts, including the boycott of The Ingraham Angle. He has also been a target and scapegoat of several conspiracy theories and right-wing accusations.

Jazz Jennings is an American YouTube personality, spokesmodel, television personality, and LGBT rights activist. Jennings is notable for being one of the youngest publicly documented people to be identified as transgender.

Barbara Rose Johns Powell was a pioneering leader in the American civil rights movement. On April 23, 1951, at the age of 16, Powell led a student strike for equal education at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia. After securing NAACP legal support, the Moton students filed Davis v. Prince Edward County, the only student-initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional.

Kyle Kashuv is an American conservative activist. He survived the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and subsequently advocated for gun rights, notably in opposition to his fellow survivors' March for Our Lives movement.

Cameron Marley Kasky is an American activist and advocate against gun violence who co-founded the student-led gun violence prevention advocacy group Never Again MSD. He is notable for helping to organize the March for Our Lives nationwide student protest in March 2018. Kasky is a survivor of the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Sophia Kianni is an American climate activist specializing in media and strategy. She is the founder and executive director of Climate Cardinals, an international youth-led nonprofit that works to translate information about climate change into over 100 languages. She represents the United States as the youngest member on the United Nations Secretary-General's Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. She has worked as a national strategist for Fridays for Future, an international spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, and a national partnerships coordinator for This is Zero Hour.

Joseph Theodore Lewis is an American school safety advocate. Lewis started Newtown Helps Rwanda, a charity that raised money for survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide as well as former child soldiers in Uganda. He previously was a candidate in the 2020 elections for Connecticut state senator for the 28th district, dropping out before the August primaries to work on a national campaign. He is the older brother of first grade student Jesse Lewis, a victim of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

TreePeople is an environmental advocacy group based in Los Angeles, California.

Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, also known by the initial X, is an American environmental activist and hip hop artist. Martinez is the youth director of Earth Guardians, a worldwide conservation organization.

Jenna Marie Ortega is an American actress. She began her career as a child, playing Annie in the supernatural horror film Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) and Mary Ann in the direct-to-video film The Little Rascals Save the Day (2014). She received recognition for her role as Young Jane on The CW comedy drama series Jane the Virgin (2014–19), and had her breakthrough for starring as Harley Diaz on the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle (2016–18), which won her the Imagen Award for Best Young Actor on Television in 2018.

Kevin J. Patel is a climate justice activist and community organizer living in Los Angeles, California. Patel has openly shared his experience as a frontline climate activist being diagnosed with respiratory issues. He is also the founder and executive director of OneUpAction, an international youth-led nonprofit based in the U.S. that supports marginalized youth by providing them with resources to create change in their communities.

Philip David Radford is an American activist who served as the executive director of Greenpeace USA. He is the founder and President of Progressive Power Lab, an organization that incubates companies and non-profits that build capacity for progressive organizations, including the Progressive Multiplier Fund and Membership Drive. Radford is a co-founder of the Democracy Initiative, was founder and executive director of Power Shift, and is a board member of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. He has a background in grassroots organizing, corporate social responsibility, climate change, and clean energy.

Lila Grace Rose is an American anti-abortion activist who is the founder and president of the anti-abortion organization Live Action. She has conducted undercover, investigative exposés of abortion facilities in the United States, including affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Zoe Rosenberg is an American animal rights activist and the founder of Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary, a California-based sanctuary for abused and mistreated farmed animals. Rosenberg founded Happy Hen when she was 11 years old, and since then it has grown into a large animal sanctuary that has given homes to nearly 1000 animals from across California. Rosenberg also speaks on animal rights related issues, starting at 12 years old when she gave a keynote address at National Animal Rights Day (NARD) in San Francisco. At age 14, Rosenberg received national press attention following an action against the Los Angeles Dodgers on July 4, 2016 in protest of the treatment of animals related to the "Dodger Dogs" sold in the stadium. As recounted in a TED talk she gave, Zoe and a few other activists ran onto the field during a baseball game with banners and were arrested on live television.

Yara Sayeh Shahidi is an American actress, model, and activist. She gained recognition for her starring role as the oldest daughter Zoey Johnson on the sitcom Black-ish (2014–present) and its spin-off series Grown-ish (2018–present). Her film credits include Imagine That (2009), Smallfoot (2018), and the lead role in The Sun Is Also a Star (2019). Time included her on "The 30 Most Influential Teens of 2016" list.

Samantha Reed Smith was an American schoolgirl, peace activist, and child actress from Manchester, Maine, who became famous during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1982, Smith wrote a letter to the newly appointed CPSU General Secretary Yuri Andropov, and received a personal reply with a personal invitation to visit the Soviet Union, which she accepted.

Matthew Joseph Thaddeus Stepanek, known as Mattie J.T. Stepanek, was an American poet who published seven best-selling books of poetry and peace essays. Before his death at the age of 13, he had become known as a peace advocate and motivational speaker.

Brenda Travis is an African American veteran of the Civil Rights Movement from McComb, Mississippi whose imprisonments for protesting a segregated bus station and participation in a peaceful high school walk out in 1961 helped catalyze public sentiment against segregation.

Alexandria Villaseñor is an American climate activist living in New York. A follower of the Fridays for Future movement and of fellow climate activist Greta Thunberg, Villaseñor is a co-founder of US Youth Climate Strike and founder of Earth Uprising.

Naomi Wadler is an American student and activist against gun violence. She has made speeches advocating for victims of gun violence in the United States, especially black female victims, most notably at the anti-gun protest March For Our Lives. She attends The Field School in Washington, DC. She is an 8th grader.

Adam Werbach, is an environmental activist, author, and entrepreneur. In 1996, Werbach became the youngest person ever elected as national president of the Sierra Club, at the age of 23. He is the author of the books Act Now, Apologize Later and Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto Werbach is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, serving as the magazine's online "sustainability expert."

Ryan Wayne White was an American teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who became a national poster child for HIV/AIDS in the United States after failing to be readmitted to school following a diagnosis of AIDS. As a hemophiliac, he became infected with HIV from a contaminated factor VIII blood treatment and, when diagnosed in December 1984, was given six months to live. Doctors said he posed no risk to other students, as AIDS is not an airborne disease and spreads solely through bodily fluids, but AIDS was poorly understood by the general public at the time. When White tried to return to school, many parents and teachers in Howard County rallied against his attendance due to concerns of the disease spreading through bodily fluid transfer. A lengthy administrative appeal process ensued, and news of the conflict turned Ryan into a popular celebrity and advocate for AIDS research and public education. Surprising his doctors, Ryan White lived five years longer than predicted. He died on April 8, 1990, one month before his high school graduation.