Making an Impact for Human Rights

By: Anika
Anika is a participant in Allowance for Good's Spring Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy: Explorers class. 

This week in ELP, we talked about human rights. We learned about the different plans and steps for fixing the problems that come with the lack of human rights. There is a declaration issued by the United Nations about human rights. We tend to take many of these basic rights for granted.

 In this class, I learned a lot about human rights and I was able to appreciate how fortunate I am. Less developed countries do not provide adequate protection of human rights, which is a problem that needs to be fixed. Some people don’t have freedom of thought, or the right to privacy. I cannot imagine not having the right to privacy and freedom of thought and speech.

 One of these rights was the right to education. Malala’s speech about the right to education was very inspiring for many reasons.  She is a young girl living in a Taliban dominated and controlled country. She is a girl and a child and the Taliban believed that the children of Pakistan, especially girls and women, had no right to education.  She still stood out, regardless of everything against her and spoke out for both girls and boys. Taliban continued to threaten her but she could not be stopped because she believed in the right to education for everyone. She was shot in the head by the Taliban but that made her even more determined to fight for access and equality of education.

 Another right is the right to food and shelter. There are so many people who don’t have 3 meals a day. Hunger and shelter is a problem all over the world, including the most developed countries. Even a country as developed as the United States has over 5,000 homeless and hungry people in just a 50 mile radius. All of my life I have grown up listening to how my classmates and I were so lucky to have food on our plates and a roof over my head.

 I have heard statistics that 1 out of 5 children go hungry. We have not discussed ways in which we could solve this problem. I would like to try and make a dent in the issue of homelessness and hunger.

One of the ways to doing that is to build awareness of this problem at a younger age. It could be as simple as teaching kids to not waste food and water, volunteering at a food bank, richer class discussions etc.