THEY STARTED WITH WHAT SCARED THEM.
Across every country in the 2025 cohort, the most committed campaigners were rarely the ones who started out confident.
They were the ones who started out scared of crowds, of judgment, of not being enough. SHIFT didn't remove those fears. It gave young people something urgent enough to do that the fears stopped being the point. They ran the campaign anyway, and in doing so, became someone their communities hadn't seen before.
Public speaking absolutely terrified Edwin.
He had never been part of a campaign before SHIFT. That changed when he joined the Planeta Vivo and helped design the "Heroes for the Community" campaign to reduce single-use plastic. He co-created a "plastic villain" character built from waste, helped choreograph the campaign jingle, and led educational workshops across 8 communities.
Their campaign mobilised 600+ people in person, collected 1 ton of plastic, and reached nearly 102,000 people online.
"I have always had the desire to do something for other people… I would like people to remember me for everything I did for my community. Today that the campaign has ended, I feel happy and excited… I learned to get to know people better, to know that you can achieve what you set out to do with a campaign.”
Edwin at the closing festival
12-year-old Samir never realized how much words could hurt, even when said as a joke. However, that all changed when he joined the Monshaat Al-Maghalqa Shifters.
Through their campaign, Samir and his 11 friends leveraged AI to develope 2 illustrated storybooks that used deeply relatable and personal stories about the impact of verbal violence.
Gradually, Samir started paying close attention to how he speaks to friends, stopped using hurtful words even jokingly, began standing up for classmates experiencing bullying, and rallied his friends to show collective disapproval for bullying. He became a source of support and kindness in his family, among his friends, and within his community.
“Samir has changed a lot. He listens better, talks to us more, and even encourages me when I’m tired. I love when he tells me that he will try again even if his grades are not perfect”.
Samir’s Mother
"I learned that one word can lift us up to the sky, and another word can bring us all the way down to the ground."
A Child during their campaign event
At the same campaign, a mother attended an awareness session. During a "positive and negative words" activity, a mother who often called her son "a failure" saw the exact words she used pop up. Seeing it displayed in front of her made the harm viscerally real, and she committed on the spot to replacing negative labels with encouraging language.
An Bao Loc first encountered SHIFT in 2022, as an 8th grader at Bao Thang Boarding School for Ethnic Minorities in Lao Cai. He watched the older Shifters with admiration and kept his distance. He told himself SHIFT was for people louder and more confident than he was.
For three years, he stayed on the outside.
What finally moved him to apply in 2025 wasn't ambition. It was the fear of spending another year watching other people live their lives. His voice shook in public. He felt awkward in conversations, slow to react. But he joined SHIFT and ran a campaign with his peers to tackle verbal violence in his own school; and it worked! Students who had stayed silent found the courage to speak up.
Senior students who had once been part of the problem became its guardians. Somewhere in choosing to join in, An Bao Loc stopped being a shy observer and became a changemaker instead.
"The greatest change wasn't just in my soft skills; it was my self-perception. I began to understand that shyness is not a permanent weakness, and my background does not define my limits. Maturity is not the absence of fear… it is the courage to keep walking even when you are afraid."
An Bao Loc, Shifter, VietnamFacing what feels impossible is often where the most profound personal growth begins, turning fear into a catalyst for action.
This internal shift sets the stage for our next three insights, where we look at how that newfound courage meets the perfect moment to create real-world change.
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Xin chao! We are Lao Cai Shifters, a coalition of four youth-led teams across Lao Cai Province united by one mission: ending verbal violence in schools.
Vietnam