Idea A Character Way in Over Her Head

[Red122]

I am working on a character for a storyline where a well known prep school gets burned down and the more privileged kids who attend there have to go to attend a school where violence, teen pregnancies, etc. are common.

This character attends the prep school, and she sees this as an opportunity to "help" the less fortunate.

I hope to steer the character where through trying and failing to make the students at the poor public school to be more productive member of society, she learns the complicated biases towards those lower socioeconomic bracket and the hard truth that you can't force people to be productive or to care.

My ideas are:

She tries to create a tutoring club
She tries to get politicians to raise money and give it to the school.
She stands up for others and tries to lecture them to be better.


It would be wonderful to get additional ideas, and I'm also stuck on something that would provoke her to "help" the poorer student. Maybe she met a scholarship student who came from a poorer area and that caused her to acknowledge her privilege and what to help with it .

 

[rae2nerdy]

Well how bigotry and bias work is that the person in question is often unaware of them. So your character could simply see herself as the white savior of the less fortunate. That doesn't require anything other than a desire to be praised by others / maybe a little bit of basic empathy.

I would also look at maybe listing her biases first. What is it exactly that she thinks separates the "less fortunate" from herself and how might she go about "closing the gap".