Inspiring Teens Magazine Features

Metal Wire Sculpture made by Shaina Zaccagnino
- Pennsylvania
Issue 16 of Inspiring Teens Magazine

Interviewed by Shaina Zaccagnino
Nomination by Tara Burnett
Photography by Simplicity Photography Art by Kristen Lyn
Oklahoma

The Nomination: Abbey Burnett- Abbey is my oldest daughter and this is her senior year of High School. Abbey mentored in a program at our local Elementary Schools, Highland Park, every Monday morning, this past year for a third grade at risk student. She served as a role model and encouraged the female student to "Dream Big" and follow her dreams of being an attorney someday. Towards the end of the school year, Abbey's mentee moved to live back with her real mom. Abbey continues to keep in touch with her mentee through social media.....she will take on a new at risk student this year to continue to inspire at risk girls to "Dream Big" and "self-love" in a vulnerable world.

How did you become interested in mentoring at risk students and how did you start?
My Mother is an Elementary Principal and works at a High Poverty school in my hometown. She started the mentoring program to "Break the cycle" for these students many years ago. I always heard her come home and talk about how inspirational and meaningful the program was to her and to her students. Last year, I came up with the idea of mentoring and to be involved during my late start Monday mornings. I also recruited several of my classmates and High School friends to mentor as well and help make the difference in a young student's life.

Why do you think helping at risk students is important?
Education is the key to living your life to the fullest and following your dreams. Many at risk students do not have that role model at home telling them that they can do this if they continue their education and do well in school. Like my Mom stated at home, it’s important to "Break the cycle" and show at risk students that the world is their oyster, so to speak. With a positive influence and role modeling, they will see this and develop self-confidence to become anyone they wish to become!

Tell me a little bit about the at-risk program at Highland Park Elementary.
According to my Mom, the Elementary Principal, Highland Park is 70% free/reduced lunch. A lot of their students are high mobility, moving in and out with their families, going where work is located. Highland Park feeds into many apartment complexes. Currently, Highland Park has over 40 adults from our local community that mentor students weekly. We visit with the students for about twenty minutes, eat lunch, play academic games, or help with homework and studies.

What do you think is the most important part about teaching at risk students to “Dream Big”?
Life is about what you give to others...time is irreplaceable. I was fortunate enough to have a family that values education and has encouraged me to go to college. Not every student has this situation at home. So, we need to inspire others. I tell my mentee that if they don't dream big, and have a vision, they lose sight of their goal and wander around carelessly. Shoot for the moon, because you will always land among the stars.

What do you plan on doing after high school?
When I graduate in May, I will be attending Oklahoma State University with a degree in speech pathology or Agribusiness. My roots run deep in agriculture and I am very active in the FFA chapter in my hometown where I hone my leadership skills. I am planning to run for a State FFA Office next spring and hopefully follow in my Mom's footsteps. She was State FFA Reporter in 1991 and Served over 20,000 Oklahoma FFA Members by inspiring them to "Dream Big." I want to do just that.....I am putting myself out there...

Abby was published in Issue 15.

Click here to buy Issue 15

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Ally Wickware

2/9/2019

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Interview by Shaina Zaccagnino
Nomination by Shannon Wickware
Photography by Brooklynn Alexander Photography
Oklahoma

The Nomination: Ally Wickware just released her first original song “Mean to Me” on iTunes, Spotify, etc. She plays piano & ukulele and is learning guitar. She does dance, theatre, art & kickboxing. She was chosen for the High Plains Leadership Team, volunteers in the nursery and works at a boutique where she does styling, modeling & social media.

How did you become interested in being a performer and how did you start?

I’ve been singing for longer than I even remember. We have home movies of me as a toddler singing country songs into a toy microphone at the top of my lungs. I then got into dance and discovered my love for being on stage! I’ve done everything from dance competitions & vocal performances to talent shows, pageants & a Broadway Revue.

How were you able to write and record your first original song, Mean to Me?

I co-wrote the song “Mean to Me” with my vocal coach, Bobbi Holliday. She helped me put my feelings into words and form it into a song that I am so very proud of. I wanted it to have a retro-pop, 80’s vibe and I love how dreamy it turned out. I recorded it with her husband, Nathan, who is a producer. I also got to shoot a music video for it that will be coming out soon!

Click here to listen to "Mean to Me"

Who has been your biggest influence in the music industry and why?

I’m so thankful for the opportunities I’ve had working with Bobbi over the years. I love her! She is definitely my biggest influence and mentor. I’ve also loved getting to know & sing with Jilian Linklater from Nashville. She is the sweetest person and a soulful singer/songwriter. I’ve been a huge Taylor Swift fan from the beginning. Her music really inspires me. I also love Halsey & Ariana Grande. They are so talented.

Tell me a little bit about the Student Leadership Team you were chosen for.

Besides homeschooling, I’m a student in the Multimedia Production Program at High Plains Technology Center. As a member of their Superintendent’s Leadership Class I’ve gotten to take field trips and hear from professionals in many different careers. These experiences cover things like leadership skills, goal-setting, business & professional etiquette and entrepreneurship. I’ve learned so much and had fun too. I’m excited for our visit to the Oklahoma Capital this month.

What do you like most about the nursery you volunteer at?

I volunteer in the nursery at Lincoln Avenue Baptist Church. I love getting to be around all of those babies! I’ve always enjoyed taking care of little ones. It’s so much fun to play with them and a great way to help out at my church. I also love my youth group and singing with the Worship Team.

Tell me a little about your job.

I work for a boutique The Hotpink Daisy and I absolutely love it! I get to style outfits, learn marketing and model things for social media. It is so much fun! I’ve always been interested in the fashion industry and I get to work with the coolest people. It is a dream job for me.

Anything else we should know about you?

I’m passionate about expressing myself and telling a story. I love all things art, travel and adventure. I’ve always been a dreamer and a creator. I have so much I want to share with the world and am just excited to see what God has planned for me.

Ally will be featured in Issue 17, coming out soon!

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Shaina Zaccagnino

12/21/2018

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My favorite program at Inspiring Teens is the Model Program where we get to style photo shoots for the magazine. ~ Shaina Zaccagnino

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Malcolm Hollett

12/2/2018

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nterview by Shaina Zaccagnino | Submitted by Malcolm Hollett
Photography by Joanne E Coady &
Chris Crockwell, Crockwell Photography
St. John's, NL Canada

I was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Growing up, I played a lot of sports and even more instruments (some of which I still play), but everything flew out the window when, on a family ski trip in 2015, I broke my back, paralyzing me from the waist down. To say the local hospitals didn't have much relevant experience, would be a gross understatement; I was told I was the fourth pediatric spinal cord injury in over 15 years... I was also told I would likely never walk again.

Soon, I found myself, and my parents, on a plane to the Shriners Hospitals for children - Philadelphia, where I would stay for an unknown amount of time. Here I worked and worked and worked, and despite this being a world hotspot for pediatric spinal cord injuries, I quickly distinguished myself as the hardest worker they had ever seen.

The medical team at Shriners were unsure what, if any, recovery I’d make but were willing to do as much as possible.

I pushed my recovery constantly, always asking for more therapy, always doing more than asked and always working.

I returned to Newfoundland late August 2015 (6 months later) with my parents and a vow never to touch a wheelchair again. Walking was tough - I could barely go 100 feet without a break - but the prospect of not walking was even tougher.

I went to the United Nations for a youth assembly in the summer of 2016, the first ever delegate from my province. There, I received a standing ovation after telling of my recovery to date.

In June 2018, just before I graduated from high school, I gave a TEDx talk, which also received a standing ovation.

I have had a few other speaking engagements at Husky Energy Canada, The Newfoundland and Labrador Construction Association, Shriners NL and more.

This year, I am taking a year to focus on my recovery and rehab. In addition to spending around 30+ hours a week training, both on my own and with my physiotherapist, I am a part of the paradigm hyperloop engineering team at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

How did you recover from this injury so far?

Well, here I was, a 14 year old kid, and I just woke up without a semblance of sensation or movement below my waist. Take this catastrophic situation and add the fact that the hospital back home had next to no experience with my type of injury and as you'd expect, you have a lot of guesswork to do.

I tried moving my legs one day: While nothing moved even the tiniest bit, I got this barely noticeable sensation as though some phantom limb, somewhere inside my legs, moved. Within all this Chaos, I suddenly had a glimmer of hope, something tangible to work with. Order.

I spent all my time trying to move my legs... When you really focus on a part of your body and let it take up every fragment of consciousness for long enough, you'd be surprised what you notice. I noticed so much I could have sworn I was going crazy, but then something worked. I got one of the muscles in my leg to move... And then came the battle of building muscle.

Within a month of unuse, my muscles degraded so much they were barely strong enough to twitch, let alone walk on. And strengthening a muscle too weak to even move, is no picnic.

At one point, I was rehospitalized for hypercalcemia. Spoiler alert: not fun. I could barely walk 50 feet, if you’d call it walking, and still used a wheelchair. Upon discharge though, I asked one of the nurses how never to get hypercalcemia again, half jokingly she said ‘walk more’... That was the last day I ever used a wheelchair… The best, and hardest undertaking of my life.

What was your time like at Shriners?

Shriners was incredible. From the moment we arrived, two weeks post-injury, we had a fully planned therapy program, several vital information packets nobody had even mentioned before, and seriously amazing food, via their world-class cafeteria (yeah, I'm not joking). They gave me 23 hours of therapy a week for the first two months at no cost, and pushed me almost as hard as I pushed myself; something no other hospital came close to. The resources, opportunities and home Shriners gave me was genuinely life changing, and without them, my recovery would have certainly looked a lot different.

What are you doing now?

I graduated high school in June, and am taking a year for rehab before university. I gave a Tedx talk just before graduation, which received a better reception than I ever dreamt, and have since been exploring the public speaking scene. I also work on the Paradigm Hyperloop engineering team at the university I’ll be attending.

My current physiotherapist is just as crazy as I am (albeit much more knowledgeable). With him I’ve been more driven and inspired than ever before. Recovery continues and nothing makes life meaningful like a challenge.

How did it get setup?
TEDx (as opposed to TED) is independently hosted, so the speakers for the event I was a part of were all chosen via application. The production itself was the fruit of many many volunteers’ hard work, as well as the financial support from sponsors and grants.

Where exactly is it?
A video of my talk can be found here: https://youtu.be/a_Qa9yGvxAM
In terms of where I had to go to give the talk, it was actually held at a local BMW dealership (since BMW was a sponsor). The place closed down that day and was reskinned specifically for TEDx. We (and by we I mean me) hinted that giving us a few BMWs would be totally acceptable, if they felt so inclined… I don't think they felt so inclined.

How did you prepare for it?
In preparation for the talk, I essentially had three tasks: Write, Memorize and Practice.
Writing my talk was by far the hardest... TEDx had provided a speaking coach to help me prepare, and we brainstormed my talk for weeks, never really producing something we were happy with. Then, two weeks before the talk, my grandfather passed away and, not to be cliche, it sort of made me take things more seriously. I stopped nitpicking over every little detail and forced myself to just sit down and write until I had a finished talk. After several long days and late nights I had something I wasn't just satisfied with, but that I was proud of, and since I had just spent so much time in a short period working on it, the memorization was a breeze.
Then came practicing. This was a completely foreign process to me, and I had very little time to do it. I presented it a few times in front of people or in front of a mirror, like everyone and their grandma says to do, but what really did the most for me was walking around my room and speaking it, or more accurately, whispering it to myself on repeat… The biggest thing I was told to work on was speaking louder, so in hindsight, the whispering probably played a role in that...
Finally though, the night before the talk, my speaking coach picked me up and took me somewhere with the same layout as where the talk would be, and made me nail my presentation at least once before I was allowed to leave. That was so important, because it was then that we noticed several presentation flaws which could have thrown my whole talk, and promptly corrected then.

What was it like that day?
A sort of nervous calm came over me for most of the day which I wasn't expecting. I was taken aback by seeing how hard everyone involved in the production had worked, and a sort of confidence came over me that only grew as we got closer and closer to the talk.
I remember just minutes before I was supposed to be on stage, being in a small room practicing my talk and tuning it to such a degree, that in my final practice run, I brought myself to tears no less than three times. I was slightly afraid of breaking into tears on stage (and on two occasions during my talk I had to pause because I almost did), but the old anecdote about public speaking, “make them laugh, then make them cry, then make them laugh again”, made me feel good about having all that emotion, not bad.
Your heart always takes a leap when you see hundreds of people in a crowd all expectantly looking to you. I've spoken publicly about a dozen times now and that initial terror never fades from what I can tell. What does change is

What advice do you have for other teens aspiring to be public speakers?
My main piece of advice is to write - as a prerequisite. Everyone has innumerable interesting ideas, experiences and observations that they've picked up over the course of their life and that would be seriously beneficial to others. It's absurd though, how difficult it can be to articulate them properly if you've put no express effort into doing exactly that. Ideas are valuable, but fully formed ideas change the world. When you sit down with an idea and you write about it, you give it form, and when you have a couple of those fully formed ideas in your back pocket - with all the major angles considered, the reasoning sound and the contradictions nailed out - standing on a stage in front of a few hundred people is a picnic.

Okay, so now you've figured this much out, you have something to talk about so now what? Well, this part is less difficult than it seems. Sure, huge companies aren't going to pay you $50,000 right off the bat to speak for them, but there's all sorts of speakers conventions and organizations and groups just about everywhere that would love to have you speak. It usually takes no more than a few Google searches or talking to 4 or 5 people who have a friend of a friend who knew a speaker to find opportunities like you wouldn't believe. Sometimes you need to just put yourself out there, apply to those things you think you have no shot at, reach out to those people you think may not even see your message, photo bomb the people doing a professional photoshoot at Peddler's Village (which how I got into this magazine) and you won't succeed every time, but the times you will are astonishingly more frequent than you'd think.

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Metal Wire Sculpture

Metal Wire Sculpture made by Shaina Zaccagnino
- Pennsylvania
Issue 16 of Inspiring Teens Magazine

Abbey Burnett

Interviewed by Shaina Zaccagnino
Nomination by Tara Burnett
Photography by Simplicity Photography Art by Kristen Lyn
Oklahoma

Ally Wickware

Interview by Shaina Zaccagnino
Nomination by Shannon Wickware
Photography by Brooklynn Alexander Photography
Oklahoma

Shaina Zaccagnino

Malcolm Hollett

nterview by Shaina Zaccagnino | Submitted by Malcolm Hollett
Photography by Joanne E Coady &
Chris Crockwell, Crockwell Photography
St. John's, NL Canada

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Metal Wire Sculpture

Metal Wire Sculpture made by Shaina Zaccagnino​- Pennsylvania​Issue 16 of Inspiring Teens Magazine

Abbey Burnett

Interviewed by Shaina ZaccagninoNomination by Tara Burnett Photography by Simplicity Photography Art by Kristen LynOklahoma

Ally Wickware

Interview by Shaina ZaccagninoNomination by Shannon WickwarePhotography by Brooklynn Alexander Photography​Oklahoma

Shaina Zaccagnino

Malcolm Hollett

nterview by Shaina Zaccagnino | Submitted by Malcolm HollettPhotography by Joanne E Coady & ​Chris Crockwell, Crockwell Photography St. John's, NL Canada

Featured

Archives

Categories

Metal Wire Sculpture made by Shaina Zaccagnino
- Pennsylvania
Issue 16 of Inspiring Teens Magazine

Interviewed by Shaina Zaccagnino
Nomination by Tara Burnett
Photography by Simplicity Photography Art by Kristen Lyn
Oklahoma

Interview by Shaina Zaccagnino
Nomination by Shannon Wickware
Photography by Brooklynn Alexander Photography
Oklahoma

nterview by Shaina Zaccagnino | Submitted by Malcolm Hollett
Photography by Joanne E Coady &
Chris Crockwell, Crockwell Photography
St. John's, NL Canada