The Courageous Child Awards

Children know when a classmate shows great courage. This could mean witnessing a classmate standing up for their rights and/or the rights of others.

This upper elementary student-led award is a way to acknowledge and support the courage of their fellow students by creating, voting for and then handing out civic awards to their classmates at an end-of-year ceremony in their school.

Children can benefit from this process: See how it feels to have agency by learning to vote; learn to run a fair election; improve civic awareness; build communication skills; learn how teams can work well together; build confidence and empathy; learn the impact of acknowledging the struggle and courage of your peers.

Adults can gain these benefits too, by observation and by showing support of the children as they take charge of this process.

Link to this 9 step framework to optimize results:

  1. Adult facilitator (educator or parent) talks to students about what courage means.

  2. The facilitator asks upper elementary students in the school if they want to consider making an award for courage

  3. Ask for a few student volunteers to form a committee to develop the award process.

  4. Student volunteers work with the adult facilitator to establish the rules and logistics for the award

  5. The volunteers create promotion(s) for the award (s). Facilitator prints promotion.

  6. Volunteers create the classroom ballot box(es) and ballot (s) for voting. Facilitator prints ballots.

  7. Volunteers help run the election with the facilitator.

  8. Volunteers (with adult help) create awards,

  9. Volunteers sign the awards and hand them to the recipients during a ceremony.

Afterwards, the school promotes the awards, sharing photos taken at the ceremony. Everyone reflects on the civic process and meaning of The Courageous Child Awards.

The New Orleans 4: Standing up for the right to a good education

This award honors children of courage, for instance, the courage of (left to right) Ruby Bridges, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost to stand up for positive change.

When 4 girls at 6 year olds entered 1st grade, they desegregated 2 New Orleans’ All-White public elementary schools. By being courageous, these girls opened up opportunities for children of color all over America.

•Bridges attended William Frantz Elementary School

•Tate, Prevost, and Etienne were at McDonogh 19 Elementary School

Angry parents pulled their children out of the 2 schools and the 4 girls spent a year being the only students escorted by federal marshals to and from their schools as they faced intense mobs and racial hostility.

All of their heroic civic actions were monumental steps forward for equality after the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. That ruling ended the ‘separate but equal’ education of Black people and White people and led to the integration of all public schools. –

Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost (above, center), civil rights pioneers were flanked by the marshals who accompanied them to school during a ceremony highlighting this important site in New Orleans. Plessy & Ferguson is commemorating sites from African American history on an emerging Reconstruction Civil Rights trail in New Orleans.

Jennifer Keelan: Rights of the Disabled

Jennifer Keelan was born with cerebral palsy and started protesting to get accessibility for people with disabilities at the age of 4 (above in wheel chair).

In 1987, 8 year old she crawled all the way up the Capitol stairs unassisted to make her point. Today she is a motivational speaker and co-author of the children’s book All the Way to the Top.

Melati and Isabel Wijsen: Saving the environment

Acknowledgements and thanks from Inquiring Minds Institute to: Leona Tate; Gail Etienne; Tessie Prevost and Ruby Bridges; Phoebe Ferguson, Plessy & Ferguson; Sydney Moore, Ace Parsi, CivXNow; DemocracyReady NY, Wilson Reihl, Inquiring Minds Insitutute Student Think Tank.

Sisters Melati and Isabel started their own company, Bye Bye Plastic Bags in 2013, when they were 10 and 12, respectively, in Bali where they live. They were inspired after sitting through a lesson about Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana, and Mahatma Gandhi in school and felt empowered to be the change they wanted to see in the world. Then, inspired by Rwanda, a small African country that banned polyethylene bags in 2008, the girls’ decided to get the people of Bali to ban plastic bags. They started with beach cleanups, graduated to petitions and government help, and their company has since grown to an organization with a staff of 25 and board of directors with teams in fifteen different countries. They successfully lobbied Bali airport to ban plastic bags in August 2016, and by January of this year, the entire island of Bali was declared plastic bag free. The country of Indonesia, one of the most populous in the world, is planning to phase-out all single use plastics by the end of 2029.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez: eco activist and rapper

His first foray into activism was an appeal to a Colorado city council to prohibit pesticides in city parks. X was 9 years old. "I was like, yo, like let’s do something about this, so I called up my mom. I was like, yo, Mom, help me get a bunch of kids together to do something about this...And, like, we changed the law." X, as he called, and his younger brother Itzcuauhtli rapped about their message in this TEDX talk. X also spoke at the United Nations on environmental policy. 

X was born in Colorado but his family moved to Portland, Oregon. He asserts that education and young people are key elements of the movement for significant social and environmental change: "The marching in the streets, the lifestyle changes haven't been enough so something drastic needs to happen.”