More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Future is Ms. is an ongoing series of news reports by young feminists. This series is made possible by a grant from SayItForward.org in support of teen journalists and the series editor, Katina Paron.
In 2019, an anti-abortion bill proposed in Missouri was temporarily blocked because of a 17-year-old’s successful protest.
“When you look at the fact that bans aren’t actually preventing abortions, I can’t see a reason to pass these laws,” Gage said.
As a fifth grader, Marley Dias told her parents none of the characters in the books she reads in school look like her.
Five years later, Dias’ campaign, #1000BlackGirlBooks, has filled school libraries and curriculums with more than 12,000 books that feature Black girls as the main character.
“I was sick of reading about white boys and their dog.”
Ryan Pascal, 18, has an ambitious goal of registering 100,000 voters, ages 18-29, by November.
Her voter registration work has one main goal: support Black and brown Americans whose votes are being suppressed.
One million immigrants await permanent residency from a lagging, 1990s-established quota system that leaves immigrants with advanced degrees in limbo for 151 years—creating an unprecedented green card backlog.
The male-dominated “atmosphere of competitions just makes girls not want to play,” Ashley Lynn Priore, 20, told Ms.
But Priore is making a difference. To date, her program, Queen’s Gambit, has reached over 500 girls in the Pittsburgh area.
A group of worldwide volunteer 3D printer owners, Makers for COVID-19 combines technology, creativity and a sense of being part of the solution. And it happens to be run by a teenage girl.
Despite schools lending devices and cities getting creative about WiFi hotspot distribution, the divide between low and high-income students persists as a barrier to learning, and it’s a barrier that widens between genders.
“Where girls may have already been behind academically or struggling socially, those kinds of challenges could be magnified in a distance learning setting.”
“We often feel alone,” Wendy Gao said, now a senior at Oakton High School in Oakton, Va. “It’s hard trying to make big changes as kids in a game that’s controlled by the establishment and the older generation.”
17-year-old Stephanie Lopez started advocating at school board meetings for school resource officers (SROs)—armed, district-funded trained police officers—to be replaced with adult hall monitors. By involving staff who would get to know the students instead of giving them citation, Lopez is looking for a more holistic approach to student management.
“We always complain that our teachers don’t really like to listen to us, but the reality is that they can’t because it’s just so difficult for them to be able to manage the meager budget they get plus trying to help out with students who [need] assistance.”
