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Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
The person who comes to mind is actually a former classmate's younger sister, who I only really know through occasional family gatherings, but who at around sixteen set up a small recycling initiative at her school that ended up getting picked up by the local council. What she did, from what I understand, started as a fairly small class project — mapping how much plastic waste the school canteen was producing — but instead of just handing in the report and moving on, she went and pitched an actual collection scheme to the school administration, and then, when that worked, took the same pitch to the district council asking them to extend it to two other schools nearby. People's reactions were mixed at first, honestly, a few teachers apparently found it a bit much coming from someone so young, but that shifted fairly quickly once the numbers started coming in — something like a genuine, measurable drop in canteen waste within a term. What impressed me about it wasn't really the environmental angle on its own, which is obviously a good cause, but the fact that she treated a school project as something with actual stakes rather than just an assignment to be completed and forgotten, which is a level of follow-through I don't think I had at sixteen, and honestly I'm not entirely sure I have it now either, if I'm being fully honest about it.