Jordan Foxworthy, 17, started the Bite Back campaign.

Her dad is the funny man, but Jordan Foxworthy is dealing with some serious issues. Jordan’s trip to Kenya when she was 14 years old inspired her to do what she could as a teen to fight malaria halfway across the world. After a trip to Kibera, Jordan teamed up with Compassion International to develop the Bite Back Campaign, an initiative that raises money and awareness for the disease.

Jordan, now 17, has raised $500,000 for the cause. She’s used Facebook and other social networking tools to challenge teens to donate $10 to purchase a mosquito net. Jordan encourages her peers “bite back” against the bug that kills more African children than HIV/AIDS.

On her famous father, Jeff Foxworthy, Jordan says, “He totally supports me and what I do with bite back but he doesn’t try to take over. He lets it be my thing.”

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Damien Declerk, 25, is a mission coordinator with Operation Smile.

“Everything OK, Damien?” I ask him every other time he zips in front of me with a different box of papers, equipment or toys. “Yeah, yeah,” he laughs. “You’re not stressed?” “No way, this is great,” he says with a genuine smile.

Damien is the mission coordinator on the Operation Smile volunteer trip I am on in Alexandria, Egypt. He’s 25 years old. His role puts him in charge of people twice his age. He oversees all the plastic surgeons, pediatricians and nurses who have donated their time and expertise to offer free operations to kids with cleft lips and/or palates, who can’t afford or don’t have access to the procedure otherwise.

Damien is the kind of guy that will make you laugh even in a crowded hospital in the Third World. He’s been on missions from Morocco to Madagascar. “We have so much and they have so little, and still, the people here are some of the kindest, most giving people I’ve ever met. There is no reason for us not to be happy,” Damien says, of course, with another contagious smile.

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Michael Evans, 25, started Full Court Peace in Northern Ireland.

I report almost every day on long-standing conflicts around the world. Sometimes the world’s best treaty negotiators or international players can’t rectify these deep-rooted battles. Michael Evans made it clear he held none of those positions when I met him a few weeks ago, but he said he had a similar goal.

Michael started playing professional basketball in Belfast after being a star player in college. “I took the offer without even thinking about the situation there. I assumed everything was over,” the 25-year-old says of his move to Northern Ireland. Of course, the cultural and religious divide between the Protestants and Catholics was far from over. Most sports were highly segregated, but not basketball because it wasn’t as popular.

Michael started Full Court Peace after coaching kids from both sides of the conflict and surreptitiously bringing them together. “I knew basketball was a neutral sport. I knew if I walked in with a cricket bat, or a football my plan wouldn’t work,” Michael says. Indeed it worked, bringing kids together on the court whose families hated each other everywhere else. The group’s mission is now to use team basketball to cultivate and inspire enduring friendships between teenagers from rivaling communities in war-torn regions of the world.

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Luqman 'Luke' Jubair, 22, seen here attending The Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in New York.

Luqman “Luke” Jubair is one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. I actually didn’t know what to expect when I first met this 22-year-old Iraqi man. He grew up in a well-off, well-educated Sunni family of doctors in Hit, about three hours outside of Baghdad, only to have his life turned upside down by war. He had always dreamed of being a doctor. At the height of sectarian violence in 2004, he endured daily threats of kidnapping and assassination going to medical school at the College of Medicine at Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, in a predominately Shiite area.

Because of what he went through and the violence he saw around him every day, I thought Luke would be bitter or vengeful, but he is nothing of the sort. In 2005, he became a surgery assistant at a hospital in his hometown. Then, during the height of violence in the Anbar Province, he moved to the Al-Ramadi Hospital where the needs were greater. Even though he was helping his people, he still hid his identity from local gangs and militias in the so-called “Red Zone,” where he lives and works.

He tells me calmly and with a smile in his eye, the next year he teamed up with other young doctors and professionals – Sunni, Shiite and Christian – who were dealing with similar fears and encountering Iraqis with limited basic supplies or services. They started a group called, Iraqis Rebuilding Our Country, or IROC. The group reaches out to locals to help them help themselves primarily with language, health and computer education.  On top of his service work with IROC, he also now works at the Al-Kadhimia hospital in Baghdad, where he says he still fears for his life.

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Garrett Gravesen and Kevin Scott started the Global L.E.A.D. program to help students study abroad.

Let’s be honest, if a college student tells his parents he wants to go travel abroad without much structure, mom and dad might have nightmares of drunken nights and gallivanting down the streets of Europe with their credit card. I came across Garrett Gravesen’s idea to change that at the “Power 30 Under 30” awards in Atlanta earlier this year. He and his business partner, Kevin Scott, are trying to tap into college students’ basic desire to go overseas and put something impressive on their resumes while helping those who are less fortunate, with their new initiative, Global L.E.A.D. Program.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to say JFK’s vision of the Peace Corp didn’t go far enough, but these guys truly believe they can bring global youth service into this century. They took 100 days to travel Africa to see how they could impact education there without implementing an actual curriculum that they believe too often encourages students to focus on the grade, tangible success or goal rather than the raw abstraction of giving back.

Global L.E.A.D. has a pilot program in the summer of next year in Cape Town, South Africa. Its methodology stems from a Wikipedia-style learning model. If it works, who knows? Perhaps more students could find that education doesn’t only happen inside the classroom or through an internship.

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Sejal Hathi, 17, founded Girls Helping Girls.

I see it less these days than when I started this series, but the idolization of careless young people continues. When I started featuring the young people who really speak for our generation, I thought of girls like Sejal Hathi, the girls and guys whose names we should know, the stories young people should look up to.

Sejal started Girls Helping Girls when she was 15. The organization aims to empower all girls to transform the world in substantive ways. One of her big initiatives is a program appropriately called Empower-a-Girl, which partners girls in the U.S. with those in developing countries. Another push is the Sisters 4 Peace Network, which provides one-on-one mentoring for aspiring changemakers and those who are actively changing their part of the world.

Girls Helping Girls has engaged 5,000 girls in more than 15 countries in North America, Africa and Asia and has raised more that $30,000 for educational programs. Now 17, Sejal’s ultimate goal is to unite young women behind the same universal vision of self-respect and service, rather than the frivolity and superficiality that has for too long been the only thing some girls see.

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Tanya Poteet, 18, volunteers with Operation Christmas Child.

Tanya Poteet says she will never forgot how she was abused and abandoned by her parents in Russia when she was eight years old. She grew up in an orphanage, separated from her brother and sister, hearing that she was worthless and would never be loved. The first time she felt like anyone cared about her was when she received a shoe box full of Christmas presents from a charity in the U.S. called Operation Christmas Child.

Now 18, Tanya lives in St. Louis with her biological siblings and their adopted family.  With more happiness and stability than she’s ever known, she still wanted to help Operation Christmas Child, the group that gave her so much.  The organization hand-delivers millions of decorated shoe boxes filled with letters, candy, school supplies and other necessities to needy kids in 90 countries.

Tanya just returned from Quito, Ecuador delivering shoe box gifts to kids in orphanages there. Contrary to the name, Operation Christmas Child believes that giving shouldn’t only be limited to Christmas time for the neediest youngsters in the world. Whether it was a pencil or socks from the dollar store, Tanya knows first hand how something small can mean so much.

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Ayna Agarwal, 15, founded Stop Animal Overpopulation Together Globally.

Ayna Agarwal will never forget the day she was visiting her family in New Delhi, India and she saw a helpless dog in the street. It was like so many she had seen there with infections, disease and missing paws. But, it was the last one she wanted to see without doing something about it.

Ayna started SPOT, or Stop Animal Overpopulation Together Globally, to spay and neuter cats and dogs worldwide, specifically in third-world countries. She sits on the board of The Humane Society’s youth division, Humane Teen, where she represents her passion for animal population control with other young people who are concerned with different issues like animal cruelty and fighting fur production. Trying to impart the issues she discusses there with others in her hometown of Edison, New Jersey, Ayna is now running a summer camp called Paws and Claws to educate kids in grades 3-5 about animal welfare and protection.

At 15, Ayna knows exactly what she wants to be when she grows up — a veterinarian and animal activist. She says she would like to eventually “speak for the animals because they can’t speak for themselves.”

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Rachel Rosenfeld, 17, founded the R.S. Rosenfeld school in Srah Khvav village in Siem Reap province, Cambodia.

During Rachel Rosenfeld’s junior year in high school, the unexpected happened. She developed a stomach condition that kept her out of school the whole year. While recovering, her sense of purpose changed after reading a New York Times article on the plight of young Cambodians.

The article followed a 17-year-old girl who most likely would have been forced into prostitution if she didn’t go to school. The problem was that there were no schools in the girl’s village. Rachel, now 17 herself, remembers how the story inspired her to write letters asking for donations so the girl could go to school.

After hundreds of letters were forwarded organically across the country, Rachel received $52,000 in donations. In December 2007, she attended the opening of the R.S. Rosenfeld School in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province. Now, 300 students there can get an education thanks to funding from an unexpected place.

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Tara Suri, 16, hopes to help to young children around the world achieve their full potential.

Bake sales and recycling are common fundraising tactics in middle school. But Tara Suri wasn’t baking cupcakes for just any common cause. Her cause was hope, literally.

When Tara was 13, she was more than saddened by her trip to India with her family. From her sadness sprung the idea of trying to help the orphans in India and Sudan whom she saw abandoned by their parents, sometimes found in garbage dumps. Tara started H.O.P.E., or Helping Orphans Pursue Education. It aims to give kids the opportunity to achieve their full potential with the basics, like a sturdy roof over their heads, that Tara and her friends sometimes took for granted back in Scarsdale, New York.

Now, at 16, she has expanded her cause with an umbrella organization called Aandolan, which means “a movement for change” in Hindi. Through that fundraising group, Tara now runs Turn Your World Around and Connect a Kid along with H.O.P.E., and a lot of it for kids growing up continents away who are in sad situations.

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