Natalie Hampton, Age 16: Created App to Fight Bullying

(Washington Post) – Natalie Hampton spent most of her 7th and 8th grade school years eating lunch alone.

The new girl at an all-girls private school in Los Angeles, she became the target of a clique of “mean girls” who excluded her from parties, called her names and even physically assaulted her, she said. They told her she was ugly and would never have any friends. They shoved her in a locker, scratched her and even threatened to kill her.

She feared telling on them, afraid of their retaliation. Once a kid who loved going to school, Natalie now dreaded it. She stopped eating, she couldn’t sleep. The anxiety became so bad that she had to be hospitalized. Her mom calls it “the darkest period of our lives.”

Natalie switched schools for high school. She chose a school that, when she toured it, seemed to prioritize community. Now a 16-year-old junior, she’s happy there, with a group of close friends and extracurricular activities. But she’s never forgotten those two dark years when she was bullied and isolated by her peers.

And she hates the idea of other kids going through what she did.

So Natalie came up with an idea that would allow students a judgment-free way to find lunch mates without the fear of being rejected. She developed an app called “Sit With Us,” where students can sign up as “ambassadors” and post that there are open seats at their lunch table. A student who doesn’t have a place to sit can look at the app and find an ambassador’s table and know they are invited to join it.

When signing up as an ambassador, the student takes a pledge that they’ll be kind and welcoming to whoever comes to sit with them.

“Lunch might seem really small, but I think these are the small steps that make a school more inclusive,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like you’re asking that much, but once you get people in the mindset, it starts to change the way students think about each other. It makes a huge difference in how they treat each other.”

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