January 9, 2003 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Nickole M. Evans started volunteering at age 6, but her commitment to good works was shaped seven years
later, by an incident that she says left her bruised but emboldened.
She and a friend were hurt, she recalls, when teenagers shot them with a BB gun as they played in their Kennewick, Wash., neighborhood. Instead of retaliating, she tried to figure out what motivated the violent behavior and to make peace.
It was 1998, and the neighbors who were firing the pellets, she says, were recent immigrants from Bosnia. “This was their idea of fun and games,” says Nickole, who is now 18. Gunshots were routine when the youngsters were growing up, they told her. “They didn’t know any better.”
Police detained the youths, Nickole says, and she walked to their homes to console their frightened parents. When the boys returned, Nickole talked with the families about the effects of violent behavior and about the way guns — BB or otherwise — are supposed to be handled to avoid harming anyone. She then offered to give the kids homework help and computer training, to more fully integrate them into American culture.
“I realized that I should make a commitment to school and people around me to make sure that violence does not happen,” Nickole says.
To this day, she spends around 20 hours a month with the Bosnians and other immigrants at the charity her mother and her mother’s husband operate out of their home. The RECA Foundation, for Realizing Every Community Asset, provides needy people with computer access and skills.
The high-school senior is involved with numerous activities, many of which are focused on helping people to get along. Among them: a Web site she designed, http://www.y2kyouth.org, listing ways for young people to get involved in peace work; a dispute-resolution group she created to help teenagers mediate arguments among themselves; and a chapter of Students Against Violence Everywhere she founded that has rallied for parents to buy nonviolent toys and for other means to reduce discord. She also helps distraught teenagers who call a phone line for counseling.
Model for Others
All of this is done with an eye toward providing an example that others may follow. To that end, most of it ends up detailed on her Web site.
“I like to see other young people taking action like myself,” says Nickole, “because it’s kind of a disappointing feeling if you’re the only one out there.” In one essay posted on her Web site, Nickole writes: “I have a belief that ‘if I can do it, so can you.’ I’m not the smartest girl in the world, nor am I the most talented. What I have is a heart and I truly care about people.”
While she has steered numerous teenagers to volunteer work of one kind or another through her Web site and the student activities she leads, Nickole acknowledges that it is difficult to get young people to reach beyond their own small circles of friends. Her classmates are supportive of her efforts, she says, but many of them can’t find time to volunteer. “They say they can’t live up to me,” she says. “It’s sad that they feel this way, because they have so much potential.”
Going Global
While Nickole’s efforts are mainly local, she actively communicates with teenagers from around the world at conferences and online to find ways to get more young people involved in service. “Nickole has always shown tremendous leadership and very strong commitment to the causes she believes in,” says Benjamin Quinto, associate director of Youth in Action, in New York. Nickole is one of 16 people who sit on the executive committee of the National Youth Action Council, which is coordinated by Mr. Quinto’s group to give young people a voice in policy making. “She is always out there doing something positive, putting her efforts into some worthy cause.”
“She takes personal responsibility for the world that she’s in,” says Pamela W. Eakes, founder of Mothers Against Violence in America, a Seattle charity that runs the Students Against Violence Everywhere program in 121 schools and colleges around the country and granted Nickole its Youth Peacemaker Award in 2000.
In 2001, Youth Service America, a Washington charity, awarded Nickole $1,500, and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, in New York, gave her $500, for a Girls Scouts project she designed to obtain and recycle 30 computers for children from poor, largely Hispanic, families.
The children, mostly girls, were allowed to keep the computers after being trained on them by Nickole, and since then, the students’ performance in school has improved, says Jean Bowman, an elementary-school counselor who advised Nickole on the project.
“The gift of the computer is an equalizer,” Ms. Bowman says. “It gives them an opportunity to be a part of the world that they live in now.”
Encouragement From Family
People who have worked with Nickole attribute her mature sense of purpose in part to the encouragement she has received from her family. Her mother, Ronda Evans, is president of the RECA Foundation, and Ms. Evans’s husband, Bruce McComb, is the group’s executive director.
Over dinner most nights, instead of making superficial chitchat or watching television, the family discusses the kinds of values that led to its engagement in the nonprofit world, Ms. Evans says. “I’m trying to teach my kids that consumerism is going to kill all of us,” she says. “Every decision you make — from eating a hamburger to how much sleep you get at night — will affect the world.”
Ms. Evans, a former nursing-home administrator and university financial-aid counselor, made a big life change in 1990 out of frustration that her work didn’t feel meaningful enough and left her with too little time for Nickole and Nickole’s younger half-brother, Evan. She relinquished her middle-class salary — and all of the pressures involved in earning it — and within two years had the RECA Foundation operating. She was joined by Mr. McComb, a retired Naval officer, when the couple was dating.
“We both had big houses, Jacuzzis, and all that kind of stuff, and we had been unhappy,” says Ms. Evans.
They earn modest wages running RECA, but when Ms. Evans’s children are home from school, she is theirs. “I can come home and talk to her just like a best friend,” says Nickole.
They have lived in a low-income neighborhood with many Bosnian and Hispanic families for the last 12 years, and Ms. Evans believes her way of life has shaped her daughter’s commitment. “By constantly exposing her to the diversity of life, she has come away with a wonderful view of what needs to be done in the world,” says Ms. Evans.
‘It Takes But One Child’
Her daughter agrees that the family’s way of life helped shape her enthusiasm for service. “It takes but one child to educate a whole village,” Nickole’s own expression, has become her motto. She uses it to headline her Web site, which contains links to groups that promote teenage involvement in community service and encourage young people to speak out on issues that concern them. It also links to Nickole’s personal Web page, where she stores her résumé.
Nickole says she gets around 20 to 30 e-mail messages a month from people who have seen her Web site and want more assistance in finding a way to help others.
At her school, Nickole helps teachers and administrators coordinate volunteer activities, and she is the school liaison with the local volunteer center. She helped design a Web page for the center that rallies young people to get involved.
Nickole would like to see more of her peers at school choose volunteer work over some of the more shallow pursuits of youth. “I say, ‘Hey, come with me, come join me, help me volunteer,’” she says, “and they say, ‘Oh, no. My favorite show is on tonight.’”
Answering the telephone at a help line for teenagers, which she does at least four hours a week, is part of the work she finds the most meaningful. She says she tries to make the callers “feel at ease and able to tell me about what’s happening because there is a lot of stress on teenagers. There is lots of drama in high school.”
Nickole plans to remain active when she goes to college, and she would like to join the Peace Corps after that. While she is not sure what career she will pursue, she says her future will surely emphasize community service. “I want to save the world,” she says. “That’s pretty much what I want to do.”
