Kyle Wright is passionate about the need to protect the rights of children. Currently a senior at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning (RMSEL) in Denver, Colorado, 18 year old Kyle has committed his free time to help communities near and far protect those rights. Having worked closely with Plan International USA and Amigos de las Americas in the U.S and served with Amigos in Mexico and Peru, Kyle is now Co-Chairman of the World Peace Caravan Youth Delegation, where he is instrumental in designing and implementing the Chime In Youth Initiative.
During his freshman year in high school, Kyle was looking for a more hands-on opportunity to make positive change, so he left the Boy Scouts to join the Bold Leaders’ Project in Denver. There he trained for a year in youth leadership, team organization and management, sustainable community development, project planning and mobilization. His team was designated to work in Sub-Saharan Africa in the summer of 2012, but the State Department was forced to cancel their departure for Africa after a threat from Al-Shabaab.
Kyle transferred his new-found skills to the NGO Amigos de las Americas, where he trained for another year to volunteer in Latin America. For two months in the summer of 2013 he facilitated daily workshops with school-aged children in the Cajamarca region of northern Peru. Fluent in Spanish, he taught the students community health and safety, environmental preservation, and children’s rights.
After returning from Peru, Kyle began working with a partner organization of Amigos de las Americas throughout Latin America, Plan International’s USA Youth Advisory Board. The Board’s primary focus is children’s rights. Kyle reviews and provides feedback on organizational policy and programming as a member of the Advisory Board and collaborates with leadership to provide youth prospective and feedback.
In June, 2014, Kyle was a speaker at the InterAction Development Forum in Washington, D.C. on behalf of Plan International U.S.A. There he spoke to a group of Development CEO’s on the importance and relevance of youth involvement in organizational governance and program/project design.
This past summer, he completed a service project with Amigos de las Americas in Oaxaca, Mexico and has now become a training representative to the Board of Directors of the Colorado Chapter of Amigos and is serving his second year as a training supervisor of incoming volunteers in that chapter, one of 26 nationally.
In October, he traveled to New York City with a conglomerate delegation from the US, Uganda, and Pakistan to raise awareness for girls’ rights as an ambassador for Plan International at the United Nations’ International Day of the Girl Week. More recently, he has begun speaking at high schools in Denver, Colorado in order to raise awareness for girls’ rights and promote the importance of those rights in the UN’s post-2015 agenda.
Throughout the year, whenever he is in the Denver area, Kyle is a regular volunteer counselor at Easter Seals Rocky Mountain Village, a provider of recreation and respite services for children and adults with special needs.
“Children do have a very powerful voice. If that voice is extinguished by oppression and outside influences beyond their control, that is an injustice to all of us. Children are, in essence, the future.” Kyle Wright