When Greta Thunberg stood before the United Nations recently, stared diplomats in the face with determination, and said emphatically, “How Dare You!” the world watched, gasping, and feeling that things might just be on the brink of changing for the better.

When Malala Yousafzai survived an assassination attempt because she challenged her country and the world to educate girls around the globe, people saw a glimmer of hope for half the world’s population.

When students like Emma Gonzales and David Hogg from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida spoke eloquently about the urgency of gun control, the world dared to hope that America would end its killing fields.

Greta Thunberg started a school strike for climate change outside the Swedish parliament in 2018. She hasn’t stopped advocating to save the planet since. Today over 100,000 school children are part of her movement, Fridays for Future. Her plenary speeches before the United Nations went viral and a performance this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and again when she faced the UN in New York daring them to take action for the sake of the world’s youth were extraordinary.

Malala, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, was eleven years old when she blogged on the BBC abut her life under the Taliban in Pakistan and starred in a New York Times documentary about life in the middle of military occupation. Always an activist, she established the Malala Education Foundation to help poor girls go to school. Her near death when she was shot on a school bus sparked an international movement that flourishes today as she studies at Oxford University in England.

The “Parkland kids,” led by Emma Gonzales, David Hogg and others, rocked the world when they stood up to the National Rifle Association, and a government in thrall to the gun lobby. Refusing “thoughts and prayers” and calling for political action they woke up the country in a way that even the Newtown Massacre hadn’t. When Gonzales “call[ed] BS” on the hollow words of politicians, and when Hogg and others took to social media, the country saw what real activism looks like. Today the energy of the Parkland students, many of whom have graduated and can now vote, is focused on registering youth to vote, and ensuring that they do.

Youth activism isn’t confined to a few well-known faces. The world is full of young activists and social changemakers offering genuine hope for a future world that can clean up its moral, economic and environmental act on a fragile but sustainable planet.

Payla Jangid is one of them. After escaping child slavery in India, she became a children’s rights advocate and is currently the leader of her village’s Child Parliament, which meets to discuss “various issues like lack of separate toilets for girls in schools and the need to stop child marriage,” she says. Like Malala, she advocates for girls’ education going door to door to explain to parents that children need support to grow.

Kelvin was just six years old when the violent civil war in Sierra Leone ended. Despite his youth and lack of education he quickly became one of the country’s leading technological inventors. At 11, he made electronics from trash. At 13, he made batteries with found materials and build a generator to power a community radio station. In 2012 he went to MIT to present his inventions to students there. Today he is an Honorary Board member of EMERGENCY USA, working to provide medical and surgical care to victims of war and poverty.

Sisters Melati and Isabel who live in Bali started their own company there when they were 10 and 12 years old. Bye Bye Plastic Bags was inspired by Rwanda, which had banned polyethylene bags in 2008. Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana, and Mahatma Gandhi also inspired the sisters to “be the change [they] wanted to see.” Following beach cleanups, petitions and government help, their organization now employs 25 people and has teams in 15 countries. Bali has been declared plastic bag free, and the Indonesian government is banning all plastic bags by 2021.

Closer to home, when the water crisis in Flint, Michigan became acute, eight-year old Mari Copeny wrote to President Obama in 2016. He called her to say he was coming to Flint and wanted to meet her. Her actions have spearheaded a charity movement that donates school backpacks to area students.

Recently in North Carolina, high school senior David Ledbetter, founder of a local organization, Imagine This, handed out sample ballots and voter registration forms to people standing in line outside a Charlotte Popeye, making national news.

Whether advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, scientists or community organizers, these children and young adults are seizing the moment, acting to save their communities, their countries and the planet. Their energy, intelligence, and compassion give us hope for the future. We need to acknowledge them as emerging adults who will lead us before long, to thank them, and to keep on an eye on them, and what they can teach us.

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They are gay, straight and transgender. They are Jewish, Christian and Muslim. They are black, white and Latino. They are middle-class, affluent, and poor. And together they are doing something we’ve never seen before. They are connecting the dots – recognizing something we now call “intersectionality,” defined by Merriam Webster as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”

They are the teens of Parkland, Florida, the kids in DC and Chicago schools, the 11-year old children who spoke so eloquently to the crowds in Washington at the March for Our Lives on March 24th. Their words were heard around the country and the world by multitudes of people who flowed into the streets of their hometowns to plead in unison that, “Enough is enough.” Together, the voices of millions formed a chorus speaking truth to power as they awakened to the connections being made in the name of universal human rights.

Now, I’m not one for quoting the Bible but I can’t refrain from paraphrasing the Book of Isiah: “And [the children] shall lead them.”

And not just away from gun violence in schools, movie theaters, malls, clubs, or the horrific violence of police shooting innocent black people and getting away with it. These future leaders were speaking about the much larger issues that America has failed to address, like poverty, class, race, gender, disability and institutionalized discrimination. They were pleading for the survival of all of us, and for a future defined by unity and not division, love and not hate, compassion and not greed, dignity and not death, whether by commission or omission. They were demanding that we place values above violence, and they did it with such respect, force, energy, and eloquence that there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd.

They taught us a life lesson and they gave us a reason to hope.

They went beyond “Mi casa es su casa,” because they know that what happens in their casa, their community, their houses of worship, their schools could happen in any one of our houses, neighborhoods, or common spaces, no matter what color we are, how much wealth we have, or how mainstream we may have become.

The root of the youth movement today, so tragically launched by the events of February 14, 2018 in a school in Florida, is what empowers students of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and the others now joining them. Its foundation is what they understand about the “realpolitik.” They are defining and now representing a new generation that is not only unique but vital, because these “kids” truly get it that together we stand, divided we fall.

Additionally, they know how to bring their vision and their message to voters, to so-called leaders, and to those whose political futures are at stake. Strategically, these emerging adults are nothing short of brilliant. They understand how to use social media and they have a natural proclivity for using the methods of media advocacy, which means they put a human face on their issue, they tell stories to humanize statistics, they include action steps in their message – Register, Educate, Vote! – and they repeat tag lines that are pithy, powerful, and easily repeated.

The woman for whom the now well-known school was named, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, would be so proud of these students. A journalist and author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservation activist, she was every bit as feisty and politically astute as the students who attend the school that bears her name. Her influential book The Everglades: River of Grass, published in 1947, redefined the popular conception that the Everglades were nothing more than a worthless swamp. It has been compared to Rachel Carson's important book Silent Spring.

According to her Wikipedia profile, Douglas was “outspoken and politically conscious, defending the women's suffrage and civil rights movements.” She undertook her work to protect the Everglades when she was nearly 80 years old and she lived nearly 30 years beyond that, working to the end.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s spirit and legacy are now being felt not only by students who went to school one day as youngsters and came out (if they were lucky) as young adults creating a new kind of leadership. It is being realized by Americans and others who may never have thought of themselves as “political” but who will be forever changed by what happened that fateful day, and the movement it spawned.

For that, we can all be grateful.