Transcriber: Yiğit Yıldırım Reviewer: 新 陈
When we think of change, we think of things that are happening globally.
However, change starts with us.
My name is Sophie Weenink.
I live in Nelson, New Zealand, and I'm 16 years old.
Today, I'm here to inspire you to be a global citizen.
When I was 13, I discovered local beaches in Nelson
had been trashed with pollution.
My mom had always raised me to be the type to get up and do something.
She told me no matter what my abilities are,
no matter how much money I have,
it is important that I stand up for what I believe in.
So for me it was disgusting when I was swimming in the ocean
and saw food packets amongst the beautiful sea life.
I decided to organize a beach cleanup. This beach cleanup
I promoted on Facebook and thought it would be great if 10 people came along.
But instead,
I had 200 people come along with 200 kgs of rubbish cleared off the beach.
It was a complete shock,
And I asked sponsors to sponsor us for food and drinks,
and they all said yes.
So what was shocking to me
was why hadn’t people done it before me being 13?
I thought it was strange that I was the only one doing something like this.
I do other events now
as I’ve been inspired by the people who turn up to my events.
I started with beach cleanups and moved to river cleanups,
as I saw the local Maitai River was also polluted.
These events have helped me inspire others from around the world.
I was contacted by Reader’s Digest to be in their magazine when I was 13.
If a 13 year old can do this, think about what thousands of us could do together.
This is me, when I was little.
I was raised by a single mother.
But this doesn't stop me to do anything.
This was the beach cleanup that I was talking about and that
is the amount of rubbish that we found.
It is completely shocking
that a small local beach like this that appears clean
could have 200 kgs of rubbish.
The river cleanups that we do, we find a lot of rubbish from people.
It’s shocking to see what we find.
It’s especially big brands which aren’t really looking out for the consumers.
I would now like to talk about how I feed the homeless community
with a lot of other helpers in our community.
I started this because I found a sleeping bag by the side of
the river, which led to a homeless camp.
But during the first lockdown was when it really hit hard.
I found out there was a man
who didn’t know we were going into lockdown.
He didn’t know what a lockdown was,
and he had no idea where everyone went.
The streets were empty.
He had no radio access, no TV access
and no newspaper access to find out what was happening.
I did a fundraiser
where we fundraised over 2,000 dollars,
and this money went to the homeless community of Nelson.
Since then, I also do other fundraisers,
such as for an orphanage overseas, animal sanctuaries.
And I also used my own money that I earned from work
to buy groceries for families who need it.
The next project that I started was for the Rainbow Crossing.
I found out online that there was a bunch of homophobic
and transphobic comments left by the community.
Not all of the community, of course.
But I wanted to do something for our Rainbow community.
So I set up a fundraiser,
and that same night that I set up the fundraiser,
I got a group of helpers and we chalked the main street of Nelson.
This made a lot of news
and it made me very happy to see
that everyone had a positive response to this.
I was so happy when I found all of the comments online
that washed out the ugly negative comments.
For me, I find it difficult when I see all of this happening and I wonder
what we could do to do better.
We should be uniting for change.
Because realistically, it doesn’t take time.
It doesn’t take a lot of money, if any.
And it doesn’t take a lot of people.
It starts with all of us.
And it is important that we all unite together to change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)