Tucker Teenager Inspires Fellow Students

Isis Hamilton, it's plain to see, is not your ordinary teenager. She is captain of the Varsity basketball cheerleading team at in Georgia and is part of the International Baccalaureate program. But that's just for starters.

Hamilton, 17, is the president and founder of the Girls Motivated to Succeed Club, formed as a way to activate and inspire her fellow students. "It's a club for sophomore and freshmen girls and they get a senior or a junior mentor," she said. "At school I noticed that a lot of girls needed guidance."

The club's activities center on themes such as self-motivation and how to do well at school. "I wanted for all the girls to be academically prepared and to do at least one community project per semester," she explained.

The first order of business was to raise money for starving people in East Africa. "There's so many people in Kenya and Somalia who are dying. It's so bad. I get really depressed seeing things like that," Hamilton said. "It makes me feel bad."

Hamilton recruited like-minded fellow seniors Courtney Scott and Melanie McCall as vice-presidents of the G.M.S. club. "It's not even poverty there," said McCall. "It's to the point where it's famine."

The trio set about persuading teachers to place colorfully painted milk jugs in their classrooms for spare change. "At first we were really scared because there weren't a lot of teachers collecting," Hamilton said, "but the second week we came around it was, like, $20 bills! One of the teachers collected $157. She was really passionate about it."

Hamilton motivated students by arranging a pizza party for the classroom that collected the largest amount. In the end, $539 was raised for the cause. "$500 can save 100 people," she said. "It was really inspirational for me that people actually cared and I was happy that it worked out because I wanted to give the money to World Relief."

The Girls Motivated to Succeed club is now working on other worthy projects. This month Hamilton and her cohorts are selling pink candy and bracelets for Breast Cancer Awareness and donating the money to the Breast Cancer Foundation. They also requested and received a grant for One Earth, a project centered on teaching students about the environment and how to reduce, reuse, and recycle.