Last fall, Lauren Bush, an 8th grader at St. John’s Episcopal School, created a YouTube video called “Word Play” during a film class. The goal was to create something inspirational, so she chose to focus on anti-bullying, but there’s no way she could’ve known then just how many people it would eventually reach.
One of Bush’s teachers learned about USA Network’s award-winning public service campaign called Characters Unite, which is centered on anti-bullying, and she urged Bush to submit her video for the “Unite Against Bullying Commercial Challenge,” a nationwide contest for middle and high school students to submit their ideas for a television ad to help stop bullying.
Bush submitted the video, then one night she received a call from NBC. “That was how she found out she’d won,” her dad, East Dallas neighbor David Bush recalls. Naturally, she was thrilled.
The Network used the ideas from her video as the basis for a public service announcement, in which Lauren and her brother Brandon made cameo appearances.
Then last weekend, the Bush family flew to New York to appear on The Today Show, which you can watch below. When she flew out of Dallas, Lauren Bush’s YouTube video had only a few hundred views, David Bush says, but by the time she got back it had had been watched more than 30,000 times.
