Have you ever had one of those moments where suddenly everything is clear? Where suddenly you know how you can mix your previous life with your new life? Where you feel in your heart the exact thing that you should be doing?
Even when you tell yourself that you should dream big, sometimes it takes a special moment to help everything click together. To help the pieces come into position until the light bulb goes off…and you realize that you are unstoppable.
For me, my unstoppable, came while listening to paralympian Dennis Ogbe, being interviewed by Jeannette Kaplun, and joined by the UN Foundations’s Aaron Sherinian. You see, Dennis Ogbe is more than just a spokesperson for Unicef and Shot@Life. He is a polio survivor. And even more than being a polio survivor, he uses his voice to impact change.
Not only that, but Dennis, along with Jeannette and Aaron hit on something incredibly powerful. The work that we do to build awareness about the causes we care about it vital…not just to the cause and to the law makers or change agents that we hope to inspire to action…but to our children. Our daughters, our sons…they are watching us use our voices. They are watching us make change.
And in the end…they are the ones that matter. Their young tween voices are the ones that matter (I am choosing to focus on tweens because they are mature enough to understand, and young enough to make this part of their every day life). Because they are the ones that will continue to impact change when we cannot. I knew this when my own daughter recently took on the charge of being a champion, swayed to action because to her…there was no other choice. I knew of the power of young change agents after seeing the movie, The Revolutionary Optimists. But now…now I want to do something about it.
Because although change starts with us…we have a bigger responsibility to foster global citizenship in our children. Empowering tweens to use their voices. To foster an understanding of what it means to care and to act…what it means to use a voice for good, intentionally…purposefully.
And that is exactly what I am going to do…who else is with me?
This first appeared in Live Do Grow.