As we close out Women’s History Month — a month to honor women’s contributions to history, culture, and society — we look to the next generation of women who will not only shape our future but who are already using their power to change the present. By investing in young women leaders early, we can help them build the tools and support systems that will enable them to flourish as leaders on the global stage.
To remind you that you can spark real change no matter your age, we’ve curated a list of 13 young women leaders you should know.
Kynnedy Simone Smith
Kynnedy founded the Creative Justice Fellowship (part of Kynnedy’s larger I Art Cleveland Program), a program that allows young artists to use their art genre to showcase how their lives have been affected by social injustices and share their stories so that we can resolve these issues.
Kynnedy Simone Smith’s life motto is “Serve Passionately.” Growing up, she was consistently the recipient of service, and so she now strives to serve her community and honor the service that made her childhood fruitful. In 2016, she founded I Art Cleveland, an arts-based non-profit with the mission to ensure that all underrepresented youth in and around Cleveland have access to arts education, funding, and programming services. In 2020, she created Chat(Her) after attending Disney Dreamers Academy and Black Girls Lead, where she learned what it’s like to be “invited to the table.” Believing it to be an experience all girls should have, she founded Chat(Her) Talks, an online forum that gives all girls a seat at the table and creates a safe space for girls to connect and inspire. A Computer Science major at Columbia University, she strives to combine her three passions in STEM, music, and activism to give back to her community and pursue her goal of creating a tech company that empowers and enhances the lives of minorities. Kynnedy is featured in the book “Unbossed: How Black Girls Are Leading the Way.”
Kynnedy is a 2021 Rajendra Foundation Social Impact Fund Grantee. Learn more here.
Alondra Fraustro
Alondra Fraustro is a young scientist and entrepreneur, originally from Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. She founded Ciencia Mágica, where she shares scientific knowledge by providing conference courses and workshops to educate people and promote care for the environment. Alondra has been recognized as a Hero of the Earth by the United Nations Organization to Combat Desertification and Drought in 2020 in South Korea for the development of an installation kit for orchards that help generate sustainable communities. She is the first Mexican to have won this award.
Alondra is a 2021 Voces Que Inspiran Fellow. Learn more here.
Follow Ciencia Mágica on Instagram.
Kelly Danielpour
Kelly is the founder of VaxTeen and a member of the undergraduate class of 2025 at Stanford University. After learning about the growing trend of teenagers turning to Reddit to figure out if they could consent to vaccinations in their states and what vaccines they needed at their age, she started VaxTeen in hopes of providing a reliable and easy-to-understand source to answer their questions. Through VaxTeen, she hopes to raise awareness amongst her peers about the importance of vaccinations and encourage those who are unvaccinated to receive immunizations as soon as they are able to. Kelly’s long-term goal is to use VaxTeen as a platform to advocate for straightforward legislation allowing teenagers to consent to all vaccinations. She hopes to one day work in health policy, focusing on ensuring universal, comprehensive preventative care as she believes it is key to reducing healthcare disparities.
Kelly is a 2020 HERLead Fellow. Learn more about the Rising Voices initiatives here.
Autumn Peltier
Autumn Peltier is an Anishinaabe Indigenous rights advocate from the Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada. She was named the youngest Chief Water Commissioner for the Aniishnabek Nation in 2019. In 2018, at the age of 13, she addressed world leaders at the UN General Assembly for World Water Day on the issue of water protection. Autumn continues her work for access to clean water for the Indigenous community and Indigenous people across the world.
Follow Autumn on Instagram, and sign her petition to ensure clean drinking water for Indigenous Canadians.
Mahryan Sampaio Rodrigues
Mahryan Sampaio is a young Brazilian majoring in International Relations at Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo (FEBASP) and a researcher in the field of Human Rights. She is an activist for the environment and racial and gender equality. She has a background in the area of Gender, Sexuality, and Social Movements at the University of São Paulo (USP). She is a member of the board of directors of the NGO I Know My Rights (IKMR), affiliated with UNHCR (UN Agency for Refugees), helping to transform the reality of children in refugee situations in Brazil through education, art, and culture projects. In addition, she is the Director of Studies and Research at the Feminist Student Center for International Relations (NEFRI), an organization that aims to promote studies and discussions on the social role of women at national and global levels. She seeks to expand gender issues beyond the academy by democratizing SDG 5-Gender Equality and its goals.
She currently works in the Coordination of Multilateral International Affairs (CAIM) of the Municipal Secretariat for International Relations (SMRI) of São Paulo, with the themes of migration and refuge, gender, education, environment, circular economy, and urban strategic development. Using her Voices that Inspire grant, she started a leadership program called Yalodê for Black women in Brazil, created with the aim of promoting social transformation.
Mahryan is a 2021 Voces Que Inspiran Fellow.
Kehkashan Basu
Winner of the 2016 International Children’s Peace Prize, Kehkashan Basu, born in 2000, has impacted the global fraternity with her work on children’s rights, peace and disarmament, climate justice, gender quality, and social upliftment. Spreading the message of peace, happiness, and sustainability has been her passion since she was only 8 years old. She has worked tirelessly to enlist the support of children and youth across geographical boundaries. In 2013, at the age of 12, she was elected for a 2-year term as UNEP’s (United Nations Environment Program) Global Coordinator for Children & Youth and a member of its Major Groups Facilitating Committee. She is the youngest person and the first minor to be elected into this position in the history of UNEP. She is a United Nations Human Rights Champion, a National Geographic Young Explorer, one of Canada’s Top 25 Women of Influence, and was named one of the Top 100 SDG Leaders in the world in 2020.
Founded in 2012 by then-12-year-old Kehkashan Basu, Green Hope Foundation is an ECOSOC-accredited global youth-led social innovation enterprise that works to localize the Sustainable Development Goals.
Learn more about Green Hope Foundation.
Dorotea Šušak
Dorotea Šušak is the Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Studies in Croatia. In this role, Dorotea leads her team in providing expert knowledge on women’s issues and the diverse themes of feminism and gender equality. Aside from her current role, she is a Ph.D. student, and she is also completing a double major in Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Furthermore, Dorotea is an MBA candidate at the Swiss School of Business and Management. Regardless of the sphere of her main affinities, Dorotea has committed herself to serve as an activist in the fields of feminism, education, and social change.
Dorotea is a 2021 VV Peace Fellow. Learn more about the VV Peace Fellowship.
Vanessa Nakate
Vanessa Nakate is a climate activist from Uganda. She was the First Fridays For Future climate activist in Uganda and the founder of the Rise up Climate Movement, which aims to amplify the voices of activists from Africa. She began striking for the climate in her hometown of Kampala in January 2019 after witnessing droughts and flooding devastating communities in Uganda. She spearheaded the campaign to save Congo’s rainforest, which is facing massive deforestation. This campaign later spread to other countries from Africa to Europe. Vanessa is now working on a project involving installing solar and institutional stoves in schools.
She also campaigns internationally to highlight the impacts of climate change already playing out in Africa and promotes key climate solutions such as educating girls. In 2020, Vanessa was named a UN Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals and was listed as one of the BBC’s 100 Women of the Year and the 100 Most Influential Young Africans. Vanessa was one of the young climate activists chosen to speak at the COP25 gathering in Spain. She was one of 20 climate activists who penned a letter addressed to the participants of the World Economic Forum in Davos, calling to call on them to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. She holds a degree in Business Administration in Marketing from Makerere University Business School.
Aimee Yan
Aimee Yan is a sophomore studying the intersections of public policy, business, and social and economic justice at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She is a passionate advocate for the Asian American community, education equity, and social justice. As a HERlead Fellow, Aimee founded Project Pantry and distributed 1,000 professional clothing items to homeless families, created a confidential food pantry serving 400 low-income students, and raised over $4,000 for homeless students across Colorado. Her passion for education led to her involvement as a Board Member on the Youth Roots Board of Directors and research assistant studying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on first-generation college students.
Aimee is on the co-founding team of Visibility Forward, which provides high school teachers across North Carolina with lesson plans, diverse classroom posters and books, and all the educational resources necessary to teach students about Asian-American history and cultures. She spends her free time storytelling, reading, and hiking in the Rocky Mountains.
Aimee is a 2021 Rajendra Foundation Social Impact Fund Grantee and 2018 HERLead Fellow.
Learn more about Visibility Forward.
Sophia Kianni
Sophia Kianni is an Iranian-American environmentalist studying climate science and public policy at Stanford University. She is the founder and executive director of Climate Cardinals, an international nonprofit with 8,000 volunteers in 40+ countries working on translating climate information into over 100 languages. She represents the U.S. as the youngest member of the inaugural United Nations Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.
Sophia’s work has been featured in news outlets including Forbes, CNN, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, ELLE, TIME Magazine, The Guardian, NBC, and even on the front page of The Washington Post. She was previously a fellow with PBS NewsHour and has written for news outlets such as MTV News, Cosmopolitan, Refinery 29, and Teen Vogue. She is a prolific public speaker and has spoken at universities across the country, including Columbia University, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge University, and Harvard University. She gave her debut TED Talk as the closing speaker at the inaugural TED Countdown Conference.
Learn more about Climate Cardinals here.
Stephanie Villanueva-Villar
Stephanie Villanueva-Villar is the Founder & Executive Director of Your Girl for Good, a D.C.-based non-profit organization that equips young girls of color with successful female mentors in the STEM, art, and political sectors. Since 2016, Stephanie has created summer mentorship programs, workshops, and summits that focus on reminding young girls of their limitless potential by connecting them with a network of supportive, professional women and exposing them to an array of career fields, college guidance, and mindfulness practices.
Stephanie is passionate about the advancement of communities of color and has collaborated with the Smithsonian, Girls Who Code, DC Public Charter Schools, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to develop and implement diversity and inclusion programs that uplift the voices of marginalized students. Stephanie is a senior at Virginia Commonwealth University and is double majoring in international social justice and gender, sexuality, & women’s studies with a minor in political science.
Stephanie is a Rising Voices Club Mentor and a 2015 HERLead Fellow.
Learn more about Your Girl for Good.
Jenna Smith
Jenna is a first-year Robertson Scholar at Duke University studying international comparative studies. She is passionate about criminal justice reform, education, storytelling, and the intersections that exist within these fields. In service of these interests, Jenna serves as the Programming Director of Kidz Vote, an organization dedicated to expanding access to civic education and rectifying historical disenfranchisement from the political process.
Jenna is a Rising Voices Club Mentor and a 2019 HERLead Fellow.
Follow Kidz Vote on Instagram.
Mabel Mariatou Jalloh
Mabel Jalloh is the Program Manager for Girl Child Network Sierra Leone, a national non-governmental organization that seeks to promote the rights and holistic empowerment of the girl in the home, school, and community in Sierra Leone. The main issues they seek to address include girls’ empowerment which they work on by ensuring their education and supporting their talents, enabling them to be future leaders. In addition to her work with Girl Child Network Sierra Leone, Mabel has also volunteered in India with International Citizens Service through Restless Development, working on health promotion and creating awareness in schools and communities. In Chile, she works with English Open Doors teaching English.
Mabel is a 2021 Voices Against Violence Fellow. Learn more about the VAV program here.