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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Teen AIDS Ambassadors pose for a photograph in Tanzania.

Santa Monica, California, is far from Tanzania. But a group of high schoolers there makes the distance seem closer. The Crossroads Teen AIDS Ambassadors are the youngest certified educator-activists in the country working toward the eradication of the disease.

The California students bring their mountainous mission to Africa. They travel to Tanzania and other countries to help tell their young counterparts about the history of the pandemic, the virology of HIV, and the importance of safe sex. Kids from Tanzania have come to California to go through the program to experience and see inspiration of a life minus the disease.

The hours are long, the information is daunting, and the trek is substantial. But from the AIDS Ambassadors' perspectives, even their small hands can help start move the mountain.

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