#youth

🇯🇴 Jordan · 7Hills Skatepark

Jordan's first skatepark has become downtown Amman's melting pot, where Syrian, Iraqi, and Yemeni refugee kids skate side-by-side with local Jordanians.

🌍 Global · Alive & Kicking

Alive & Kicking hand-stitches footballs, netballs and volleyballs in Kenya, Zambia and Ghana, turning ball-making into fair jobs and a platform for health education.

🇸🇿 Eswatini · All Out Africa Foundation

From a research camp on the Mbuluzi River, this Eswatini-registered nonprofit has spent over a decade training Swati scientists and monitoring the country's savanna wildlife while feeding thousands of vulnerable children.

🇧🇸 Bahamas · Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation (BREEF)

For over 30 years this Bahamian foundation has been growing coral nurseries and turning thousands of schoolkids into reef defenders.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Boxgirls Kenya

Boxgirls Kenya teaches boxing and self-defence to girls in Nairobi's informal settlements, using the ring to build confidence, leadership and protection from gender-based violence.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Bridges for Music

A purpose-built academy in Cape Town's oldest township, Langa, trains young creatives in electronic music production, DJing, and the business skills to turn beats into livelihoods.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Buskaid

A purpose-built music school in Diepkloof, Soweto, gives township children free string instruments, lessons and a shot at a professional music career.

🇩🇪 Germany · German Ocean Foundation (Deutsche Meeresstiftung)

Germany's leading ocean foundation sends teenage researchers to sea and has connected over 62 million people with ocean science since 2021.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · MoveGreen

A youth-founded Kyrgyz NGO turned Bishkek's invisible smog into real-time public data, then built a region-wide coalition to act on it.

🇦🇺 Australia · Clontarf Foundation

Clontarf uses AFL and rugby league academies embedded in schools to keep young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men engaged in education and headed toward jobs.

🌍 Global · Common Goal (streetfootballworld)

A global network born from streetfootballworld pools football talent, money and know-how to fund grassroots organisations using the game to tackle poverty, conflict and inequality.

🇩🇲 Dominica · WildDominique

A homegrown band of Dominican ecologists and marine biologists running beach cleanups, endangered-reptile monitoring and environmental education across the Nature Isle.

🇱🇦 Laos · Association Anoulak

A French-registered, Laos-based conservation team led community rangers on anti-poaching patrols and biodiversity surveys in the Annamite Mountains' last saola stronghold.

🇦🇿 Azerbaijan · Birding Azerbaijan

Volunteer counters stake out a narrow strip of Caspian coastline every autumn to log one of the largest bird migrations on Earth passing through Azerbaijan.

🇨🇺 Cuba · Cuba Skate

What began with 30 skaters and a handful of boards in Havana has grown into a nationwide youth movement reaching every province of Cuba.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Duzi-uMngeni Conservation Trust (DUCT)

Since 2005, DUCT has been watchdog and rehab crew for the uMsunduzi and uMngeni Rivers, pairing water-quality monitoring with jobs for the communities living along their banks.

🇶🇦 Qatar · Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar

A youth-run non-profit that has spent a decade turning Qatari and Arab youth into climate campaigners, carbon-trackers and environmental journalists.

🇼🇫 Wallis and Futuna · Faiva Tautai

A handful of worried fishers on Wallis marked out their own no-fishing zone to bring the lagoon's fish back.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Field Band Foundation

An Africanised take on the American marching band turns brass and percussion into a life-skills and HIV-education programme for nearly 6,000 township and rural young people.

🇦🇸 American Samoa · Finafinau

American Samoa's only youth-led environmental nonprofit turned 150 teenagers loose on a single beach and hauled out 4,000 pieces of trash.

🇬🇷 Greece · Free Movement Skateboarding

In Athens, a skate charity gives displaced children from dozens of countries a shared board and a rare say over their own bodies and choices.

🌍 Global · Fridays for Future

The youth-led school strike movement, sparked by Greta Thunberg, that put climate on the world's front pages.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Fundación Colombianitos

Fundación Colombianitos uses football, play and life-skills education to steer children from Colombia's most violence-affected communities away from conflict, addiction and recruitment.

🇧🇳 Brunei · Green Brunei

A youth-led platform turning Brunei's beaches and classrooms into frontlines for plastic cleanup, tree planting and climate literacy.

🇨🇲 Cameroon · Green Cameroon

A Buea-based grassroots NGO that replants degraded slopes around Mount Cameroon and restores community water sources across all ten of Cameroon's regions.

🇨🇩 DR Congo · Green Congo Initiative

An indigenous youth-led team in Goma is replanting the Congo Basin, paying mostly women to grow the trees that hold eroding hillsides together.

🇹🇩 Chad · Green Team Tchad

A youth-led climate collective in N'Djamena is turning school playgrounds into climate action clubs, arming Chadian teenagers to fight desertification and urban heat with tree nurseries and public speaking.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Greenpop Foundation NPC

What began as a festival to plant 1,000 trees in Cape Town has grown into a movement that has put more than 257,000 indigenous trees in the ground across Southern Africa.

🇬🇱 Greenland · Greenland Trees (Dasht Foundation)

Working with a school in Narsaq, this small Dutch-Greenlandic initiative grows native trees from seed in an Arctic greenhouse and plants them across a degraded former military base in southern Greenland.

🇹🇳 Tunisia · Notre Grand Bleu

A Monastir-based association rescues stranded sea turtles and guards their nesting beaches along Tunisia's Mediterranean coast.

🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago · Nature Seekers

A village conservation group founded in 1990 turned Matura Beach from a poaching hotspot into a stronghold protecting half of Trinidad's nesting leatherback turtles.

🇬🇺 Guam · Guåhan Sustainable Culture

A BIPOC women-led nonprofit is rebuilding CHamoru food sovereignty on an island that imports over 90% of what it eats.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Indigo Youth Movement

In South Africa's Valley of a Thousand Hills, a rural skate camp has turned empty afternoons into jobs, mentorship, and a way out for Zulu kids.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Isango Ensemble

A Cape Town theatre company built almost entirely from township performers with no formal training reimagines Western opera and classics through South African music, dance and marimba.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Bicara Udara (Yayasan Udara Anak Bangsa)

Three worried mothers turned a change.org petition against Jakarta's smog into a nationwide youth movement for the right to clean air.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Jo-Jikum

Marshallese teenagers turn traditional weaving and songwriting into climate advocacy that reaches all the way to COP summits.

🇦🇺 Australia · Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa

Martu Traditional Owners run four ranger teams protecting threatened desert wildlife and culture across millions of hectares of Western Australia's Western Desert.

🇲🇩 Moldova · Eco-TIRAS International Environmental Association of River Keepers

A coalition of more than fifty Moldovan and Ukrainian river-keeper NGOs works to keep the transboundary Dniester River healthy for the eight million people who depend on it.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Keiskamma Trust

In the small village of Hamburg, rural women turn embroidery, beadwork and applique into monumental tapestries that have hung in South Africa's Parliament and museums worldwide.

🇰🇮 Kiribati · Kiribati Climate Action Network (KiriCAN)

Kiribati's first homegrown climate NGO mobilizes women and youth to replant mangroves and carry i-Kiribati voices into UN climate negotiations.

🇦🇺 Australia · Korin Gamadji Institute

Named 'grow and emerge' by Wurundjeri Elders, Richmond Football Club's Korin Gamadji Institute uses sport and culture to build the next generation of Indigenous leaders.

🇹🇴 Tonga · MORDI Tonga Trust

In Tonga's villages, MORDI Tonga turns community-written development plans into seed banks, cyclone-ready infrastructure, and new income for rural families.

🇮🇳 India · Magic Bus India Foundation

Magic Bus uses weekly sports sessions led by young community mentors to keep India's poorest adolescents in school and out of child labour and early marriage.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Mahonia Na Dari Conservation and Research Centre

Papua New Guinea's 'Guardian of the Sea' has spent nearly three decades teaching Kimbe Bay communities to run their own no-take marine reserves in the heart of the Coral Triangle.

🌍 Global · Make Life Skate Life

This nonprofit crew of skaters, architects, and builders has poured Iraq's, Myanmar's, and Bolivia's first public skateparks, then trained locals to build the next ones themselves.

🇨🇾 Cyprus · Terra Cypria - The Cyprus Conservation Foundation

On an island where dam levels have dropped to a fraction of capacity, this Limassol-based foundation mapped every wetland in Cyprus and now fights to keep its rivers and salt lakes alive.

🇦🇿 Azerbaijan · IDEA – International Dialogue for Environmental Action

A Baku-based youth-powered NGO has planted more than five million trees across Azerbaijan and mobilized volunteers for coastal cleanups and recycling drives since 2011.

🇬🇩 Grenada · Ocean Spirits Inc.

Since 1999 this Grenadian NGO has run the Caribbean's longest continuous leatherback turtle survey and driven beach egg poaching down to almost nothing.

🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda · Environmental Awareness Group (EAG)

Antigua's oldest environmental NGO turned a near-extinct endemic snake into one of the world's great reptile comeback stories by clearing invasive predators from 16 offshore islands.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Piku Biodiversity Network

Papua New Guinean schoolkids-turned-rangers from seven tribes now guard the pig-nosed turtles their communities once hunted.

🇵🇦 Panama · Mother of Corals

Scientists and dive communities in Bocas del Toro are hand-building artificial reef structures to bring Panama's Caribbean coral back from the brink.

🇦🇲 Armenia · Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets (FPWC)

Since 2011 an Armenian NGO has been leasing degraded farmland from local communities to rebuild the only privately protected wildlife area in the South Caucasus, now a refuge for the Critically Endangered Caucasian leopard.

🇬🇷 Greece · We4all

Born from the ashes of Greece's 2018 Mati wildfire, We4all has replanted more than a million trees across the country's scorched hillsides.

🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Richmond Vale Academy

A volunteer training school on St. Vincent is rebuilding storm- and disease-battered reefs one hand-planted coral fragment at a time.

🇦🇹 Austria · Sindbad - Social Business

Sindbad pairs socioeconomically disadvantaged Austrian teenagers with trained young-adult mentors for up to a year to help them cross the finish line into an apprenticeship or further schooling.

🇧🇲 Bermuda · Keep Bermuda Beautiful (KBB)

One of Bermuda's oldest environmental nonprofits mobilizes thousands of volunteers a year for coastal cleanups that have removed over a million pounds of litter from the island since 1964.

🌍 Global · skate-aid e.V.

A German nonprofit has poured concrete for kids on four continents, turning donated skateparks into classrooms for resilience and self-determination.

🇵🇸 Palestine · SkatePal

Volunteers and local skaters have hand-built concrete skateparks across the West Bank, turning empty lots into some of Palestine's only public play spaces.

🌍 Global · Skateistan

A Berlin-headquartered NGO turns skateboarding into a classroom, reaching thousands of at-risk children every week from Kabul to Phnom Penh.

🇸🇩 Sudan · Sudanese Environment Conservation Society (SECS)

Sudan's oldest environmental NGO keeps a 113-branch volunteer network running climate-resilience and conservation projects despite the ongoing war.

🇦🇹 Austria · Superar

Started by the Vienna Concert Hall, the Vienna Boys' Choir and Caritas Vienna in 2009, Superar gives children who couldn't otherwise afford it free, intensive orchestra and choir training.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Surfers Not Street Children

A Durban charity that pulls vulnerable street children into surf clubs, mentorship and life-skills programs, turning some of them into surf coaches, lifeguards and professional surfers.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Sustainable Coastlines

Sustainable Coastlines mobilises thousands of New Zealanders to clean beaches and turns what they find into the country's only national litter database.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Care for Coral

Two Thai sisters turned a high-school coral-planting project into the country's first youth-led coral restoration nonprofit, taking volunteers underwater to grow reefs from Phuket to Koh Tao.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Transfrontier Africa NPC

South Africa's Black Mambas patrol Greater Kruger unarmed, using visible presence and community roots to push rhino poaching toward zero.

🇧🇼 Botswana · Cheetah Conservation Botswana

Trains local Tswana livestock guarding dogs so Kalahari farmers and Botswana's 1,700 wild cheetahs can share the same unfenced land.

🇧🇯 Benin · Songhaï Centre

Songhaï Centre turns organic waste into thriving farms, training hundreds of young Africans a year in profitable, chemical-free agriculture.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ubuntu Football

A six-year football-and-academics programme turns talented boys from Cape Town's townships into university graduates and professional players.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ubuntu Pathways

One integrated campus in Zwide township delivers healthcare, schooling, and family support to 2,000 vulnerable children so poverty stops with their generation.

🇻🇺 Vanuatu · Vanuatu Environmental Science Society (VESS)

Volunteer divers photographing sea slugs and dugongs are helping Vanuatu chart marine life it has never formally recorded.

🇫🇲 Micronesia · Waa'gey

Master carvers on Yap's remote outer islands are teaching the next generation to hand-build ocean-going canoes and navigate by the stars, keeping millennia-old wayfinding knowledge alive.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Waan Aelõñ in Majel (WAM)

A Majuro boatyard turns at-risk Marshallese youth into master canoe builders, reviving ancient seafaring skills as a path to jobs and cultural pride.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Waves for Change

Surf therapy nonprofit using ocean-based mentorship to support youth mental health in South Africa's coastal townships.

🇦🇺 Australia · Waves of Wellness Foundation

Waves of Wellness pairs group cognitive behavioural therapy with free surf lessons to help Australians rebuild their mental health in the ocean.

🇸🇴 Somalia · Somalia Earth Volunteers (SEV)

A youth-led Puntland nonprofit combines tree planting with frontline research to save Somalia's most endangered mammal, the Somali wild ass.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Zip Zap Circus

A free, uniquely South African circus school trains Cape Town youth of every background in trapeze, acrobatics and performance, turning street kids into professional artists.

🇦🇹 Austria · fairplay Initiative (VIDC)

Since the 1997 European Year Against Racism, fairplay has used football pitches across Austria as classrooms for fighting racism, sexism and discrimination in sport.