She dubbed herself “Little Miss Flint” and continues to fight for clean water. The campaign, which has also improved conditions for some drivers, has sparked similar efforts in other ports across the country. The driving forces of change today are often under the age of 25. They were eventually reunited in Los Angeles, where Salas grew up. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, a close friend of Johnson's and a transgender rights activist, founded, Johnson is known for her involvement alongside Rivera during the. At eight years old, Ansari was forced into the mica mining industry in India where he worked eight hours a day for two years. She brings more than 25 years of community organizing experience to this battle. After working for ACORN, Bhargava joined CCC in 1994 and has energized the organization by recruiting a young and diverse staff, leading campaigns to address America's poverty crisis and its fraying social safety net. The group is bringing people together to say that enough is enough. Now 50, Rome began his activist career as a community organizer with the Connecticut Citizen Action Group after graduating from Wesleyan University in 1985. An advocate for mental health awareness, Fox is the founder of the Sad Girls Club. Ships and trucks spew toxic pollutants that result in high cancer and asthma rates, particularly in nearby communities and among the port's more than 10,000 truck drivers. Now at 20, she continues to advocate for the education of girls and women everywhere. In 2012, the Pakistani Taliban shot her in the head for going to school. CIW scored its first major victory in 2005, when Taco Bell agreed to improve wages and working conditions in response to a national consumer boycott. In 2001, CIW launched its Campaign for Fair Food--forging an alliance between farmworkers and consumers, including student, religious, environmental, and labor groups. Fried, now 41, and Robles, now 43, had learned of the potential shut-down, informed the employees, and developed a plan. Lander led the Council's efforts to reform police abuses, including racial profiling, stop-and-frisk practices, and surveillance of innocent Muslims. She joined CHIRLA after finishing Occidental College and became director in 1999. "All we have to do is help them understand the power they have and the tools they need to do it.". He continues to fight for equality for trans students and to amplify trans voice. He fights against climate change and for implementing large-scale solutions. Earlier this month the Energy Action Coalition and other groups brought over 8,000 activists, including high school and college students, to Pittsburgh for a Power Shift conference to energize the growing youth movement that is mobilizing to address global warming and environmental injustice, including opposition to fracking, the Keystone pipeline, and universities' financial investment in big fossil fuel corporations that are destroying the planet. In Los Angeles, organizer Patricia Castellanos led an unlikely coalition of the Teamsters, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), and local public health and community groups to clean up the country's largest (and until recently, the filthiest) port area. Recently, she spoke at the Women’s March in Washington DC. In response, she is speaking up against the issue of child marriage. Almost four years ago she and other activists launched ACCE to build a statewide movement for social and economic justice. Harvey Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians elected to office in the United States, and the first openly gay official elected in California. Drawing lessons from my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, I observed that the United States is now at a critical turning point, with the "unholy alliance" of Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, the Tea Party, and the Religious Right unraveling in front of us, creating openings for progressives to challenge the corporate and conservative establishment. She works with communities in India as the leader of her town’s Child Parliament to make communities safer. Before working to help raise the voices of Walmart employees, Schlademan, a graduate of Rutgers University, led several of SEIU most successful campaigns among low-wage workers. As the New Bottom Line coalition, they mounted protests at bank headquarters around the country, generating media attention and helping Attorneys General Eric Schneiderman of New York and Kamala Harris of California successfully push for a stronger national settlement with several major banks, which resulted in over $25 million in foreclosure relief. So it was a major milestone when New York State passed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010. As the campaign director for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), she's been organizing a national campaign to get cities to use their eminent domain powers to seize "underwater" mortgages from banks and resell them to homeowners with affordable monthly payments. In addition, students distributed leaflets inside Sports Authority stores and sent Twitter messages to customers of the Dick's Sporting Goods chain, urging them to boycott Russell products. Last year, Obama agreed to suspend the deportation of, and grant work permits to, the young "Dreamers" who came here illegally as children. USAS also picketed the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals in Orlando, Florida, and Los Angeles to protest the NBA's own licensing agreement with Russell. While Milk led pride marches and was widely known as a fighter for LGBTQ rights, he also fought for issues affecting the entire San Francisco population, including access for affordable housing and daycare for working mothers. People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) -- the group he founded with Eric Walker - now has an enviable track record of winning victories that have improved the lives of low-income people on the West Side, a diverse neighborhood with a poverty rate of 45 percent, and a per capita income of $6,650, that includes blacks and Latinos, as well as one of the nation's largest communities of refugees resettled from Burma, Somalia and Sudan. That movement helped to give Obama a second wind and contributed to pushing the bill through Congress. Since then she has gained prominence and media attention in continuing to speak up for immigrant rights. The coalition trained about 100,000 recruits in civil disobedience and organized protests at the headquarters and stockholder meetings of Cigna, General Electric, Bank of America and other corporations. Holyoke College. It paid off, however, as her video went viral and Alizadeh received a scholarship to finish high school in the U.S. She continues to fight oppressive systems through her music. Born in Mexico, Lucas Benitez at 17 moved to Immokalee, Florida, to work in the tomato fields, where he seethed over the mistreatment, lousy pay and backbreaking working conditions. Milk served in the Navy for several years but resigned after being questioned. Who are the young (50 and under) radicals and reformers among us now whose names may not be well-known to the general public, but whose activism is changing the country in a more progressive direction? Mel Watt (D-N.C.). At Robles' initiative, and with the help of their union, the workers formed and incorporated New Era Windows, a worker-run cooperative, and began to raise the funds needed to buy the machinery from their former employer and keep producing windows, and their good jobs, under the new arrangement. The workers' take-over was hardly spontaneous. A founder for the March For Our Lives movement, Kasky and other Parkland student activists are spending the summer touring 20 states to speak out against gun violence. In 2012, the new owner, Serious Energy, announced it was shutting the plant. The campaign in Richmond, CA is driving Wall Street crazy. She co-founded two different organizations working to build a strong community for LGBTQ youth,  Youth blackout DC and Gender and the Orientation Alliance. Before RuPaul, drag was viewed as an obscure subculture. Since then, she’s been speaking out for girls’ right to education. Goehl has knit NPA's loose network into a more coherent organization that can juggle local and national issues simultaneously, shepherding NPA into alliances with unions and other activist groups -- a remarkable accomplishment in the turf-conscious world of community organizing. Advocating for more representation of young girls of color, she collected more than 10,000 books. After Congress passed Obamacare, HCAN has played a key role in pushing states to implement the law and working with labor, community and other organizations to help Americans sign up for health care insurance. International Union League for Brand Responsibility, United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers union, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). ", M.A.C. An activist working to fight the stigma of the AIDS virus, Liza lost her mother to AIDS when she was six years old. Jamal organized a mass student walk-out in New York City to protest Trump’s travel ban. Alizadeh is an Afghan activist speaking up against forced marriage. In 2007 she helped found the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has grown into a network of groups in nineteen cities and eleven states. Recognizing that one of the keys to creating a more competitive state is increasing the number of Texans who turn out to vote, in just seven months, Battleground Texas has helped over 3,500 Texans become Volunteer Deputy Registrars under the most restrictive voter registration laws in the country, so they can help engage potential voters in their communities. This unprecedented victory came after a five-year organizing campaign led by Domestic Workers United and one of its founders, 38-year old Ai-jen Poo. Many toil twelve to fifteen hours a day and are paid less than $200 a week. The family was torn apart again when federal officials raided the sweatshop where her mother worked and deported her. Kimberly White/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images. Every year port-related pollution in Greater LA causes 1,200 deaths -- a statistic directly connected to the miserable working conditions for drivers, who cannot afford the high cost of maintaining their trucks. His contributions to the LGBTQ community boil down to the impact he made as a pioneer in drag, and how "Drag Race" drastically changed the way millions of Americans view — and appreciate — a key facet of gay culture. She refuses to let anyone disparage or belittle the movement. Confronting a right-to-work environment and establishing rights for immigrant workers, many who are undocumented, Schlademan helped workers win union representation, healthcare and better jobs for more than 5,000 janitors after a successful four-week strike. Although she did not get to meet with the president on her trip to D.C., Obama made sure to visit her during his trip to Flint. Last year she served as field director for Obama for America in the crucial state of Ohio, where she oversaw a team of over 600 field staff and 130 offices. -- in the House's climate and energy bill: Under her leadership Green For All has helped states like Washington and New Mexico, and cities like Portland and Seattle, implement green jobs and energy-efficiency programs.