Sarah Hemminger grew up in Indiana understanding the debilitating power of social isolation. When she was a girl, her father discovered that their pastor was dipping into church funds and reported it to the congregation. Instead of doing something about the pastor, the community shunned her family. Sarah and her siblings would sit at parties and neighborhood events and nobody would talk to them. She spent eight years of her childhood ostracized.

She also learned what it looks like when people come around to heal isolation. When she was in high school one of her classmates, Ryan, failed his freshman year because his home life was crumbling. Six teachers rallied around him, serving as extended family members. Ryan recovered, ended up getting into the U.S. Naval Academy and married Sarah.

Years later, she was beginning work on her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, mapping the neural structures of the brain. She was lonely, and she saw kids throughout the Baltimore schools who were lonely and isolated, too.

She got the principal at Dunbar High School to give her names of some of the school’s most academically underperforming kids and persuaded dozens of Hopkins students to volunteer as extended family members for the kids, driving them to school, bringing them lunch, driving them back to school when they skipped out, doing homework with them, taking them camping.