Dollar by dollar, teen charity donations add up

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Like so many good ideas, it started out with a sketch on a piece of scratch paper.One Dollar for Life began two years ago as an idea between Los Altos (Calif.) High student Margaret Lewis and her world studies teacher, Robert Freeman.There are 23 million high school students in America, they figured. If each gave a dollar, they could make a sizable dent in world poverty.Lewis went on a class-to-class speaking tour. She shared pictures she had taken over the summer while living for seven weeks with a host Kenyan family in a rural village outside Nairobi."As a teenager, it feels like everybody is asking me to embrace the reality of the world but not to change it," said Lewis, who graduated this year and is going to study film at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in the fall."I told the students that our parents were hippies who rebelled at our age -- what are we waiting for? They could afford a dollar from their lunch money, or their work fund."The idea spread, and the students who joined the One Dollar for Life movement collected $9,000 that first year, enough to build a classroom for a school in Naro Moru, Kenya.Lewis helped build that classroom, and then went to Nepal this summer to build another classroom for children who were attending school under a tree.Her experiences have helped Lewis decide she wants to be a documentary filmmaker and a humanitarian activist."We're the 9/11 generation, who grew up watching our country go to war," she said. "How can we not be interested in global charity?"(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)