YUIKO TSURUNO

Words of Impact,
Founder

Yuiko Tsuruno is a 15 year old student based in UWC ISAK, and is someone who believes everyone should be entitled to the right of and be empowered to find their contentment in life. She is passionate about developing close and interpersonal relationships and equitable access to justice. She is a Youth Ambassador of ASPIRE 2030, a global youth campaign co-organized by UNESCO. 

One of her most memorable moments was that, when she was 10 years old, her best friend in England came out to her as a lesbian on Pride Day and expressed feelings for her. She didn’t know about the LGBTQ+ community back then - her friend was a very kind and caring person so she was really happy and honored to be told so.

She always wanted to work at the United Nations and travel to different countries to support people in various areas such as poverty and discrimination. She thinks that since she was a child, the only thing she wanted was for the people around her to live in a happy and peaceful world. She was and still am interested in the reason why people discriminate and hurt one another, and this is something she would like to research more about.

Her favorite activity is the book publishing contest in which she is participating. The book is to inform children on social issues, and hopefully make them interested in books as well. Since she was little, she would read biographies of activists and researchers who impacted the world and she believes that has influenced her to be interested in social issues. Therefore, she would like to make younger children interested in social issues through the book that she writes.

To further her mission, Yuiko founded Words of Impact, to address an existing gap between leadership education and students across her community of schools. While there are many courses that teach on how to successfully lead or execute projects, there are very few classes about what kind of issues exist in the world or educational resources that fill us in about the details of each issue. Therefore, what students need first is to find an issue they can be passionate about, learn about it and figure out a possible solution for it. Words of Impact is designed to allow students to choose to learn about an issue from a variety of issues and subsequently provide them with relevant information and resources to assess their creativity to ideate towards a solution.

In the future, she, through the ASPIRE 2030 Framework, aspires to influence the younger generation to be interested in and take action on both social and environmental issues, and to understand the importance of taking action and the power we collectively have to change society.