About Generation Inspiration
A Letter from Our Founder, Ashley Bell
In 2004, I founded Generation Inspiration in my hometown of Gainesville, Georgia, to enable, empower and inspire the next generation of leaders, and set them on a trajectory for success. Together with other young professionals looking for a way to volunteer in our community and work with at risk youth, we rallied around the concept of “Each One, Take One.” Using technology and our partnership with graduation coaches in the Gainesville City School system, each of us dedicated a few hours a week to work with parents and teachers to drastically change the outcomes of the students we targeted. What’s special about Gainesville is that we had so many seasoned volunteers willing to give a few hours of their time to change the lifetime of a young person. If your community sounds like Gainesville, we are willing and ready to help you inspire the next generation of leaders.
Today, GI is not only a mentor-driven and student lead organization at Gainesville High School, but also an eight-week summer leadership program located at the historic Beulah Rucker Memorial Museum. The Museum’s 501c(3) educational foundation is the non-profit home of GI, and is named after an African-American woman who in the early 1900s started an industrial school for freed men, women and their descendants to learn skills and trades. It is at this very school that GI welcomes a class of 30 to 60 students every summer - over a third of whom are first generation Americans. Two thirds of the students come from disadvantaged backgrounds or have been identified as at risk of not graduating. The other third are high performing students that influence and help their peers meet the overall high expectations for the group’s success. Over the course of eight weeks, they learn local multicultural history, personal financial accountability, networking, drug abuse prevention, economic development, how to use social media responsibly and for civic engagement, and peer conflict resolution.
At the end of our time together, each summer we award several “Next Step” Scholarships. We have facilitated the Next Step for hundreds of high school students. Very simply – we work with each student to create a roadmap that will guide them from their present to their future, enabling them to create real impact in our world and their own lives. We then empower them with the necessary resources to take the next step of that journey. These resources range from high-powered laptops that allow for extra non-classroom time to learn to code, to stipends allowing students to take an unpaid internship they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford.
Over the last decade, GI alumni have gone on to become Peace Corps volunteers, engineers, entrepreneurs, social justice activists, educators and faith leaders. Together with your help we can accomplish so much more.