"My age has no impact on how much I care".

In 1999, when I was 11, my parents took me to the Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization. I remember seeing the turtles and the Teamsters marching together, representing the unity that environmentalists and union activists felt in fighting the WTO.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The energy at the WTO protests and hearing about the Radical Cheerleaders--a group of young activists who cheer at rallies and protests--made me want to get involved on my own. My grandma is a proud member of the Seattle Raging Grannies, so I guess activism has always been in my blood.

The Radical Cheerleaders seemed so cool because they were inspiring change and having fun at the same time. Through the Cheerleaders, I found the group Portland Peaceful Response Coalition (PPRC), which is a progressive social justice group that helps to organize many events in the Portland area. They became my second family.

In PPRC, I was treated as an equal, not as a child. At all the meetings I started going to, people were so excited to see "new blood." The adults treated me, and the handful of other students who were there, as though we would one day save the world. Everyone was excited to have students speak at large marches and participate in planning--people were there to listen and did not care that I couldn't vote or even drive. The entire group became my mentors, pushing me to contribute even more by being a labor reporter for a local progressive newspaper and working with the Cascadia Network for Peace & Justice, which organized the mass demonstrations in Portland before and during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were always opportunities to contribute, and I was able to do things I never thought I would do and which led me to my passion--social justice and union organizing.

Still, we student activists often get the feeling that, in the minds of other activists, we are somehow less capable of doing certain things. Want to get young people involved? Listen to us because of our ideas, not our age, and encourage us to take leadership roles. For example, we can do things usually reserved only for "seasoned" activists, like getting march permits, planning actions, and acting as police liaisons.

Being a beat reporter and working with the labor group Jobs with Justice has helped me show others that being a student activist does not mean that I care only about "youth" issues such as military recruitment or education. Breaking everyone's stereotypes of lazy, apathetic, trouble-making teenagers makes it fun to do the work I do.

Joining the Radical Cheerleaders showed me that you can always make someone's day by trying to change the world, even one pom-pom-filled cheer at a time. I am just as excited to become a Raging Granny as I was to become a Radical Cheerleader, because my age has no impact on how much I care.

Lila Zucker, 18, is a first-year student at the University of Washington.