Blogger helps raise $1 million so NYC kids can visit Harvard

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

NEW YORK (AP) — A fundraising campaign inspired by the popular photo blog Humans of New York has raised more than $1 million to send middle-school students from a high-poverty Brooklyn school on field trips to Harvard.

Thirteen-year-old Vidal Chastanet told blogger Brandon Stanton in a Jan. 20 post that his principal, Nadia Lopez, was the person who had influenced him the most.

"When we get in trouble, she doesn't suspend us," Vidal said. "She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter."

Stanton went to meet Lopez at Mott Hall Bridges Academy and found she was busy raising money to send her sixth-graders to visit Harvard.

FULL story at link.



FILE - This Oct. 2, 2013 file photo shows street portrait photographer Brandon Stanton, creator of the popular Humans of New York blog, near Union Square in New York. A fundraising campaign inspired by the popular photo blog has raised more than $1 million to send middle-school students from a high-poverty Brooklyn school on field trips to Harvard. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150129/us--humans_of_new_york-harvard-45e522290e.html

[jtuck004]

1. Part of the reason we are who we are is because we let ourselves be insulated.

Each state ought to be sending kids and adults across the country to see what is out there, and perhaps to another country as part of senior high. The wealthy kids get it, and the country deserves the result if all of them would.

The cost of not doing it is far higher.

[rjsquirrel]

2. Oh that makes a lot of sense, not

Maybe one or two of those kids has any realistic hope of being admitted to Harvard. For the rest, it's "look at how people richer than you live." That much money could be spent in so many better ways. If they want to visit an Ivy League campus they can take a train uptown to Columbia.

It's not about Harvard. This is a rich person's fantasy of doing something for the poor.

[dembotoz]

3. welcome to du and you nailed it better ways to spend a million $$$$$$$$$$$