Tyler Lashley knows he can make a difference.

It doesn’t matter that he is only 11 and doesn’t have tons of money to give to charity. In the four years since he worked on his first project, a stuffed animal toy drive for children at Duke Children’s Hospital, Tyler has had one lesson repeatedly reinforced: He has the power to make the world a better place.

“I believe kids can do anything, even if they are just kids. They can help their world because anybody can help anybody,” said Tyler, co-founder of Kids4Change, a nonprofit group that starts projects for children to be able help their community.

Children are an incredible, but largely untapped, source of change in society, said Maureen Daly, vice president and co-founder of Kids4Change. It’s not that children can’t be intuitive and altruistic because there constantly are examples of them leading the charge for change. Too often, though, people, including children themselves, underestimate what the youngest members of society are capable of accomplishing.

People often see the New Year as time for a fresh start, Daly said. So, what better time for parents to start thinking about ways to teach their children they have the potential to positively influence their local community, their nation and their world?

“All in all, I think it would be really cool to grow up a generation of people who wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, I am really socially conscious’ but who just are. That is just part of their lives,” Daly said.

This holiday season, the students at Benvenue Elementary School held a Thanksgiving food drive for United Community Ministries, a food and clothing drive for My Sister’s House and made cards to send to troops stationed overseas, said Georgia Morris, 11, student body president. What the students are doing helps their community, she said, and that makes them feel good.

“You can teach kids by encouraging them in whatever they want to do or when they are young, taking them and letting them try to do something. If there is a soup kitchen nearby, they can take them and let them help out and they can help out, too,” said Georgia, a fifth-grader.

Several groups of children have visited Autumn Care of Nash in Nashville, and the effect on the residents is obvious, said Barbara Bozelle,

activities director. When the children walk through the halls singing carols, hand out Christmas cards or put on a holiday show, residents always are thrilled. Even people who rarely smile can be seen with big grins when children come through.

“The kids enjoy it, too, and I think they like the attention that the residents give to them. They just want to touch them. It just does them both good really. They just reach out to one another,” Bozelle said.

Still, Bozelle said she wishes the children’s groups would not only visit around Thanksgiving and December. People in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities need good cheer all year.

The more you give children the opportunity to help, the more they believe in themselves and what they can do and the more people who see them in action believe in them, said Quintin Mangano, principal of Benvenue Elementary. Coming off the holidays, plenty of children will have participated in projects such as caroling at a nursing home, collecting gifts for charities and blood drives, all of which are important.

But all of those projects and more can be carried beyond the holidays and become a part of a child’s everyday life, Mangano said.

“You need to start early. I think it is very important that they understand that giving back to their community and giving to people who are need is fulfilling for themselves and also serves a purpose to help the other people. We also never know when we are going to be in a position when we are in need of help,” Mangano said.

Community service not only is training children to be better people but to become leaders, said Ray Franks, scout executive and chief executive officer for the East Carolina Council of the Boy Scouts of America in Kinston. People who help and are concerned for others usually are the best community leaders, he said.

“Find community service for them to get involved in in their own community and see what a major difference that makes. Talk about the ripple effect that can cause. The most important thing is doing it now when they are young and developing that habit,” Franks said.

They key simply is to start, Tyler said. When he was 7, Tyler became sick and had to be rushed to the emergency room. It was a scary day filled with needles, medicine, beeping machines and strangers.

About a month after his hospital visit, Tyler heard about fundraiser for children at Duke Hospital on the radio, Daly said. He was surprised to learn that there were children who stayed there longterm and felt bad that they were alone.

“He was pretty much determined that every kid who was going to be visiting Duke Children’s Hospital would have a stuffed animal friend, would have some kind of warm cuddly animal to keep them company when they were scared. Because talking to his friends, they decided that is the kind of thing that would make a difference. When he was in the ER, if he had had one of his stuffed animals, he would have felt better,” Daly said.

The drive was a success, and Tyler was able to deliver more than 700 stuffed animals to Duke Hospital, Daly said. After that, Tyler and Kids4Change have worked on Relay for Life fundraising, helped with food and toy drives and made cards for victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The children said decided to make the cards because what they would want if they were in that situation is to know somebody else was thinking about them.

“That is what it comes down to. We are not operating in a vacuum. It really is a global community. If we want to see change and if our kids want to live in a different world, then they are going to have to make it and they are going to have to start now,” Daly said.