March 23, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
PRESS CLIPPINGS
As teenagers become increasingly involved in community service and charity projects, many are using personal experiences or their reactions to global and local problems to start nonprofit organizations or act as fund raisers for other groups, says Teen People (April) in an article called “20 Teens Who Will Change the World.”
Among the group are a few teenage celebrities, including Jamie Lynn Spears (the star of Nickelodeon’s television show Zoey 101), a volunteer for the American Red Cross and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, in Washington, and Malcolm David Kelley (who plays Walt on ABC’s Lost), a spokesman for First Star, a Washington advocacy group for abused and neglected kids.
However, most of the teenagers featured in the magazine are everyday adolescents. Among them:
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Inspired by poverty-stricken towns she saw on a visit to Guinea, May Lan Dong, 18, raised $50,000 to start Operation West Africa, in Cambridge, Mass. Her charity helped build a girls’ dormitory at a vocational school in one of the towns, and gave books and other supplies to Guinean high-school students.
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Jourdan Urbach, a 14-year-old violinist, created Children Helping Children, a Roslyn, N.Y., group that uses music to help sick children and raises money for medical research. Mr. Urbach has raised more than $200,000 for several hospitals and charities.
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After reading about drought-induced food shortages at pantries near her home in St. Joseph, Mo., Lindsey Williams, 18, developed an irrigation system in her backyard garden that yielded more than twice the amount of vegetables that most small-scale farming methods produce. She has donated 35,000 pounds of her homegrown vegetables to local food banks.
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Farah Ahmedi, 18, who lost her leg in 1994 when she accidentally stepped on a land mine in her native Afghanistan and wrote a book about the experience, helps raise money for the United Nations Adopt-a-Minefield program, which helps clear away land mines around the world. She now lives in Carol Stream, Ill.
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After a swimming accident caused Molly Farrell, 16, to be paralyzed from the neck down, she participated in an experimental treatment that helped her regain the ability to walk four months after she was hospitalized. Ms. Farrell, who lives in Wheaton, Ill., then decided to start helping others in similar situations, and has raised more than $285,000 for the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which helps people who are paralyzed.
The article is available online at http://www.teenpeople.com/20teens.
