MINNEAPOLIS, Minn -- The large, golden Tiger earrings that dangle from her ears catch your attention, but you quickly discover that neither shines as brightly as the young woman wearing them, Minneapolis South Senior Sadie Pelini.
"Well, see I don't really want to have like, a boss", says Sadie. "I'd like to be self-employed and be able to do what I want to do."
Now, before you make the mistake of dismissing Sadie's thoughts consider that she is well on her way to making just such a scenario entirely plausible. Sadie is currently in her second year as editor-in chief of South's award-winning school newspaper 'The Southerner', and she hopes to put that experience to good use.
"Really, what I want to do is, I want to write whatever I want to write and hope that people will pay me money for it", says Sadie. "I like to write feature stories that are really long so, were probably talking about magazines."
Sadie also likes to use the school newspaper to address issues in the school and in the community at-large. While the issue of mental health has been in the spotlight in the wake of the Newtown shootings, at South, there's a group that been trying to erase the stigma of mental illness for years.
Says Sadie, "I think if there were more groups like this in every school there would be attempts to try to prevent things from happening, rather than fearing and isolating people who have mental illness".
The group, called the 'Silver Ribbon Campaign', meets 17-times-a-year to support students who have mental Illness, who have friends or family who are dealing with mental illness, and those who want to make a difference.
"Erasing the stigma around mental illness, that's what we want to do", says Sadie. "Our group won NAMI's first stigma-busting award this year and we've been nominated for a couple of other awards and we just want to have a group where South is accepting, and I think we've really achieved that."
Not content to impact just the community around her, Sadie is also working with a family friend to fund academic scholarships for women in Africa.
"We're trying to raise money to give them scholarships and the program is being sponsored by the Sierra Leone Village Project", says Sadie. "We've raised probably enough money to fund about 30 scholarships right now, but we'd like to reach a goal of 100."
To reach that goal the group is holding a fundraiser at 'The Hot Plate' on March 7th, and direct donations can be made to 'Project Glow', the Sierra Leone Village Project', through their website or their Facebook page.