Jessica Kavinsky Wants To Change The World

My Walnut Hills High School intern, Isabella Noe, spoke with a young world changer. Below please see what Isabella learned of Jessica, her Modern Abolitionist Movement Club, and what Jessica wants to do to make change happen.

photo credit: Isabella Noe

“When I tell people I don’t drink Starbucks, don’t buy Nike and don’t eat Hershey’s, they have no idea why. These are a few of many large corporations that abuse fair trade laws and perpetuate modern slavery. There are more slaves today than any time in human history…  My freshman year, my sister started the Modern Abolitionist Movement club (MAM) at my school. It was mostly seniors, and the next year they had all graduated. The club dissolved. But, I realized, over the summer, that this was important. The more and more I saw about it, and the more and more I heard, human trafficking was something I wanted to fight against, and I wanted to start up something at my school, so I brought back MAM. Since then, I have realized human trafficking is not an isolated issue, it is a systematic issue. The reason sex trafficking is ignored in the United States and in third world countries is that we have a systematic abuse of women in today’s society. I want to go into business to work out corporate sexism, because at the moment, there are more men named John in the workforce that are CEOs than there are women. I want to show the world that this is who we are, this is what women around the world look like, and this is what they face on a day to day basis. I want to bring value to women because there are women out there being treated as animals.

I’ve noticed, through MAM, that there are many other people like me who care just as much about it, and that at our age, we are still vital to the fight because we have this youth outlook on the issue. There are adults who do not have as much passion as we do about this issue, which makes me know that this is what I’m meant to do. No, I don’t want to change the world a little. I want to change the world a lot. Long term, not short term, to change the system- not the people. I won’t see the results right away because there are people in charge who don’t see the new ways, who don’t know what equality looks like. So no, I don’t want to change one person, I want to change the system.”

-Jessica Kavinsky,
student at Walnut Hill High School