Meet Claire Wang, the teen connecting 10,000 girls with free tutors

Wang plans to go to college to study chemistry with a minor in education, and to keep working on Future Female Scholars. For Claire Wang, the value of education was realized through a story told in the home. Her grandmother, who grew up in Hunan, China, wanted to be a teacher, but had to leave school in the second grade to work. Claire used to complain about going to school, but after listening to her grandmother’s story, she started to look at education differently, not as an obligation but a privilege. That realization eventually led Wang to turn her love of education into a worldwide movement. In ninth grade, Wang and her best friend, Vivian Lu, co-founded Future Female Scholars, a group that connects under-served girls across the globe with volunteer tutors, Wang told Points of Light website in an interview. According to the same interview, the idea was inspired by Wang’s belief that education and well-being should go hand-in-hand. She learned that more than 119 million girls around the world do not have access to education and she wanted to help girls who faced similar circumstances to those that had interrupted her grandmother’s schooling. What began as a small initiative has...