First Place-$1,000 Scholarship (USD): Anne Sabol, from Ohio. Why is it vital to invest in adolescents?

          “Children are the future.” This phrase has been repeated time and time again by those who have realized that children will make up the adult generation of tomorrow. It is vital to make sure that children are able to grow and thrive during childhood. However, it is also vital to consider the lives of adolescents. A group in between adults and children between the ages of 10 and 19, adolescents are often overlooked. However, out of the estimated 6.8 billion people in the world, adolescents represent 1.2 billion of these individuals. All adolescents need a time to develop and discover who they are. Unfortunately this is not always the case, and adolescents around the world are forced to take on inappropriate or adult roles in the community merely to survive. These roles include that of a hard laborer, a refugee, and even a soldier. Being forced to accept these roles at such young ages can have lasting effects on their lives as adults, hindering the next generation from reaching their full potential for success.
          Child and adolescent labor is defined as work that compromises the physical, mental, or emotional health of the child or adolescent. This is detrimental to an adolescent’s life. Long workdays in dangerous or lethal conditions are often characteristics of this type of labor. Adolescence should be a time when individuals can develop and explore the world and their opportunities. This is not possible if adolescents must work in a physically and mentally grueling environment for the entire day just to attempt to overcome poverty. The long-term effects of working around hard or potentially toxic chemicals or choosing work over education can inhibit the individual’s future and whether he or she could become a productive member of society or better his or her life as an adult. This is why fostering this development is so important in adolescents—to allow adolescents to become successful adults. Adolescent and child labor forces youth to take on the adult responsibility of a full time job far before they are ready. This issue affects an estimated 215 million children or adolescents. Investing in alternatives for adolescent labor is vital in order to more opportunities for these adolescents as adults instead of allowing their future to be negatively impacted.
          Refugee is also often a title that adolescents are forced to take on far too early. In fact 44% of refugees are under the age of 18. Refugees are people displaced from their native land due to fear of persecution for any number of reasons. Also, adolescents may often make the journey from their native land completely alone. This experience would be traumatic for anyone, but adolescents are even more affected. Going through this experience can cause emotional and mental problems for life. Adolescent refugees may also be confined to refugee camps, eliminating prospects for a better future. With all of these experiences impacting the everyday lives of adolescents, they cannot even begin discovering who they will be as adults as they have no sense of where they belong in the world.
          Wartime is also not an atmosphere that adolescents belong in. However, many soldiers in combat or military service around the world are between the ages of 12 and 18. These soldiers’ numbers are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Adolescents are often targeted for recruitment because of their ability to be manipulated and their lack of a concrete notion of death. Adolescents should not have an intrinsic notion of death; they have their entire lives ahead of them, yet this fact should not be exploited. On the battlefield adolescents are altered forever.  In the book A Long Way Gone by Ishamel Bael, he describes his life as a soldier who was recruited at the age of 12. Bael states the unthinkable; that as an adolescent soldier, “killing was becoming as easy as drinking water.” Often left maimed, with horrific images witnessed firsthand, or with post traumatic stress disorder, an adolescence spent on the warpath stays with an individual for the rest of his or her life. The promise of an exciting future is replaced with trying to overcome an experience that the world never intended for humans so young.
          Some may question why those in the Western world should be concerned with bettering the lives of adolescents a world away. However, all of humankind should be provided the same opportunities and the time as an adolescent to discover these opportunities.  Young people cannot develop into fully functioning adults nearly as well if they are forced to assume adult roles before the time is right. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Allowing these horrific things to happen to adolescents is unjust, and diminishes how just our society as a whole is. “Children are the future,” but they cannot accept this role if they are not first allowed the proper adolescence. Investing in adolescents is investing in a productive and bright future for the world and is therefore vital.

Second Place-$500 Scholarship (USD): Sumukh Bharadwaj, from Washington State

Imagine a world where 1000’s of little kids are stuck in a factory working 24/7 with less than a bowl of rice per day.
Or where an 8 year old child is sold by her own family because they had no choice as a result of their economic situation and they thought this is was what was best for her having no clue that she would be sold into prostitution.
Or where little kids in a third world country are seen participating in combat situations with machine guns when they don’t even start understand the implications of ending the life of another being.
The sad part about this is that this is not imagination, it is reality. Millions of kids every year are affected by child maltreatment whether it is human trafficking, horrible working conditions or adolescents in armed combat. As of now over 215 million adolescents are engaged in child labor and 115 million in hazardous workplace conditions. These adolescents are treated as tools; as means to an end, like their life has no meaning. All their dreams and aspirations are shattered like a glass bottle slamming against the floor. Each child is his or her own person.
Children are the ones that shape our future because they are the ones that will take on the roles of society when we wrongly treat them, not only are we being immoral, we are destroying the future.
Not only does child maltreatment physically harm adolescents and children, it has major psychological implications. No words can describe how a little child will feel after doing manual labor for so long and being pushed into prostitution by his or her own family. In addition to this some adolescents are exposed to deadly chemicals that cause them to lose their life.
Investing time and money into adolescents right now is paramount because the environment they live in now will shape their future. Them living in a good environment will result in them being functioning members of society in the future.
So now comes the question, how do we approach the issue? Many people believe that them making a small change makes no difference, but all it takes is on little change at a time. Just one more bag of rice might be the difference between a family selling their child to traffickers or caring for it. But the most important and necessary solution is education. We need to educate our adolescents and their families so they don’t make catastrophic decisions. We need to educate those around us so we can help make a change.

Imagine that there are twenty young people standing shoulder to shoulder in front of you; ten boys and ten girls.  These twenty people represent every adolescent in America and throughout the world.  Now, out of the ten girls, four will be pregnant at least once before the day they turn twenty.  One of them will be raped before age eighteen.  Two of these young people will be the victim of a violent crime before they turn fifteen and two will be homeless by eighteen.  And one will not make it to see their twenty-first birthday.
With the odds so heavily pitted against young adults, how can we possibly get by?  And, as the economy and lack of faith in government make people question whether or not to continue funding and investing in the young adults of the world, we are now forced to ask ourselves a new question:  Can we do it alone?
Children and young adults in impoverished countries are at greater risk of death, disease and starvation than anyone else.  And these risks do not stop once a child turns from ten to eleven.  And if we only focus our attention and funding on children and not adolescents, young adults will be desperate to provide for themselves and their families, which then has the potential to lead into dangerous child labor situations.
Teenagers are just as, if not more, vulnerable than children.  Human traffickers commonly target young adults because of this.  By educating youth, we can gradually ensure that teenagers will not fall victim to trafficking or forced labor.  But this goal can only be achieved through a full and proper education.  But youth can also learn through education of a different kind:  example.
Young people learn by example.  If they grow up in abusive, estranged households, chances are their own children will grow up in similar situations.  This shows that actions, not money, are the foremost defense against a wasted generation.  By learning from our mistakes and making conscious decisions to benefit the greater good, we will be setting a positive example for the youth of the world.  An example that they will surely carry on to the generation that follows.
As we all know, the children and teenagers of today are the adults of tomorrow.  The type of adults that they will be, however, is shaped by the parents and mentors who are currently around them.  These influences will decide whether the upcoming generation will be one of doctors, hopeful politicians and carding educators, or a generation of violence, homelessness, sickness and desperation.
It is true that great attention must be paid to children in the first decade of their lives, but we simply cannot leave young adults to fend for themselves in this world.  When a child reaches age eleven, are they no longer in need of guidance?  Of education?  Of monetary support and encouragement?  Should any eleven, thirteen or even sixteen year old be expected to no longer have needs…needs that older generations should be addressing?  No.
In fact, eleven to nineteen year olds are in a very confusing and critical time of their lives.  While they are trying to evaluate their current situations and plan for the future, they are being constantly influenced by the world around them.  If we do not ensure that our young adults have positive guidance and support, then we cannot expect them to develop to their full potential.
And their full potential is where we need every adolescent to be.  With a nation on the edge of a breakdown and a world that is in need of hope, an educated resourceful and promising generation could be a godsend. 
Think once more of those twenty young people I mentioned earlier.  If you could save just one from the despair that faces them, would you?  Because one thing is for sure:  we cannot do it alone.

Going through the years of adolescence is different for all of us. No doubt that we all have our conflicts and trials, but they can vary from things like what ethnicity we are, to the school we attend, or the country we live in. Often it feels like the adolescent years of our lives are a constant fight. For some of us, our biggest fight in the last couple of days is that we are tourists not tore-ists. But conflicts that we may face can range from figuring out why that cute boy or girl wont notice you, to struggling to find a job so you can help support your family. Yet there are children and teenagers that have to face trials on a whole new level. It might be hard to believe because we are so fortunate. But there are kids who are starving, young girls that are being raped who end up pregnant and left to fend for themselves with inadequate resources! As hard as I may think my life is sometimes, you couldn’t pay me enough money to trade my problems for theirs.

When you talk to people and their parents some might say that there adolescence were the best years of their life, others might say they were the worst, and others will never be heard because they were not fortunate enough to make it past 11 or 12. The thing is that these years of our life are hard, and the kids and teenagers of our world need to be taken care of.

Babies become the children of the world; they need to be fed and looked after. The children become the adolescents and teenagers of the world; they need to be protected against violence and they deserve to be educated. They should be at school all day, not work! At last the adolescents become the adults of the world; we should be the next leaders, not the next rebels fighting against our government. When I look around I see everyones possibilities and their potential. I can see lawyers, doctors, potential leaders, maybe even future representatives for the United Nations. We have possibilities. Yet, there are others around the world that cannot be bothered to get an education because they are to busy finding their next meal, and fighting to stay alive. They don’t have the possibilities that we do. The United Nations is an organization that has recognized this, and is doing the best they can to help. They are trying to put all children and teenagers on a path, a path to an educated world, a path to a safe environment.

The adolescence of today’s world... our generation is the world’s future. People our age are the ones who can make a difference in this world, in our world. We can bring change and better days.

Better days for not only some people, not only for the people in wealthier countries...

  but for ALL people!

  Vi är framtiden (swedish)
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  Við erum framtíð (Icelandic)
  Wij zijn de toekomst (Dutch)
  We are the future (English)