Ian Somerhalder: Raise your voices!

Ian Somerhalder has encouraged youth to “raise voices” on climate change and gun violence.

The 36-year-old The Vampire Diaries star has been involved in activism for years.

And during a live Facebook video he created on Friday 2 October (15), Ian urged his fans to take action on environmental welfare and firearm violence.

“I don’t know if anyone [else] is so sick and tired of schools being bombarded with bullets and guns,” he noted. “There’s no need to make our educational institutions dangerous places. This stops right now, today. Raise your voices.”

Ian made the motivating statement in light of a mass shooting that took place in Oregon this week. A 20-year-old male reportedly entered Umpqua Community College and began shooting at staff and students, leaving 13 dead and an estimated 20 others injured.

In December 2010 the actor launched his charity the Ian Somerhalder Foundation, an organisation that “aims to empower, educate and collaborate with people and projects to positively impact the planet and its creatures”.

Ian is a native of Louisiana and the devastation left by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico opened his eyes to the need for philanthropy.

“I hit my absolute apex of vulnerability when I returned to my home state of Louisiana during the gulf oil spill disaster and witnessed mass devastation to every demonstration of life surrounding me—from grass, trees, bayous, insects, to animals and people,” he recalled to The Mash in 2014. “Overcome with a raw true sense of helplessness, I knew I never wanted to feel this way again. As I surveyed the echoing voices around me, I realised there were countless others who were just as impassioned and were ready to make some serious changes. We united as a family of international change-makers that soon were known as the IS Foundation.”