Children who lend a helping hand show they can make a difference and change the world

His class at The Principia School in St. Louis studied the spill's effect on birds. He even went to a hair salon to gather human hair to be used on booms to capture the spreading oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

But Dylan wanted to do more. He created a website, onestartsmany.com, with help from his mother, Carrie Silver-Stock. "I was really worried about the sea creatures," Dylan says. "My mom asked me if I wanted to make a website, and I said 'sure'. And I came up with the name One Starts Many."

The website includes Dylan's ideas on how to protect the oceans.

At a November fundraiser he collected $1,145 to send to two Gulf charities, Kids in Need During Disaster (kindd.org), which buys clothing for children in a fishing town hit by the oil spill, and the Audubon Institute in New Orleans (auduboninstitute.org), which treats stranded and injured marine wildlife.

With support from WitKids (witkids.org), a program that supports kid-based projects (its motto is "whatever it takes to make the world a better place"), Dylan traveled to the Gulf last summer on his own "fact-finding" mission, which included meeting New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

In September, the 7-year-old spoke to first-graders through fifth-graders at his school to tell them about his trip. He also invited them to become members of his new Ocean Club, which he established at the school.

The club already has helped to clean up a local creek.

"It's inspiring for us that he felt like he could make a difference," says Mrs. Silver-Stock. She and her husband, Steven Stock, wanted "to nurture that in any way that we can," she says. And Dylan says he isn't done.

"I think I'll stay interested in the ocean for a while," he says.

Danielle: A kid-run network spreads peace

Danielle Gram spent her childhood in Maryland in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

"I really didn't understand why people from different cultures wanted to kill each other," says Ms. Gram, now 21 years old and a senior at Harvard University.

After her family moved to Carlsbad, Calif., she continued to think about the concept of peace and how to achieve it. She read the nonviolent philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi and studied what Buddhism and Christianity had to say on the subject.

In 2006, together with Jill McManigal, a mother of two young children, Gram, then 16, founded Kids for Peace (kidsforpeaceglobal.org), a nonprofit, child-led group that inspires kids to work together toward a more peaceful world.

Today Kids for Peace has more than 75 chapters in several countries. In August, its Great Kindness Challenge, where children try to see how many acts of kindness they can perform in a single day, drew thousands of participants in 50 countries.

Members also sign a six-line "peace pledge" in which they promise to "speak in a kind way," "help others," "care for our earth," "respect people," and work together.

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