Thirty ideas from people under 30: The Politicians

They are explorers and activists, artists and educators, farmers and faith leaders – even mayors. And they have trenchant suggestions on how to improve the world.

Ronan Farrow: Young voice at State

Ann Hermes / The Christian Science Monitor
Ronan Farrow, Rhodes Scholar and current Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Global Youth on the steps of the New York City Public Library on Friday, December 16, 2011.

As the Arab spring captivated the world last year, the US was criticized for being slow and hesitant about supporting what were often youth-led revolutions.

Now the State Department hopes to improve the US record by focusing on ways to engage the world's youth in political and social change, and Ronan Farrow, 22, is a key force in fashioning the new initiative. For Mr. Farrow, the son of actress Mia Farrow and director Woody Allen, America's stake in heeding the world's youth and helping them keep their passion for involvement alive is one of the seminal lessons of 2011.

"We recognize now that as a cornerstone of our national security interest around the world, we need to be listening to young people in new ways and empowering them to be peaceful, nonviolent [political] participants," says Farrow, a special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on global youth issues. "That is a significant change in the way we do business."

America's youth foreign policy will be built on two pillars: young entrepreneurs participating in global markets, and programs encouraging peaceful political and civic participation. Secretary Clinton will lay out the specifics in a major speech later this year, but sustaining the interest of booming youth populations in their countries' progress is an immediate priority.

"Secretary Clinton makes the observation a lot that young revolutionaries are not the ones that come to lead their countries. That's a very important truth," says Farrow, who earned a law degree from Yale when he was 19 and recently was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University for 2012.

As we watch – in some cases apprehensively – for the outcome of these youth-driven revolutions, that will be the important transition, he adds. "Can young revolutionaries make the leap to building institutions and participating within government systems?"

David Grant, Washington

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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