OKEMOS - A student volunteer group at Okemos High School is raising money and volunteering throughout the community, impacting lives miles and cities away.

ACTION started in 2002 and is the largest student volunteer group at Okemos High School with around 500 members. It is overseen by Advisor Rachel Freeman-Baldwin, who has been with the group since it started. ACTION works everything local, mainly with the Okemos Elementary Schools, Okemos Education Foundation and local soup kitchens.

A lot of the fundraisers and charities were developed from the original ACTION Presidents and have been modified throughout the years based on what works and what doesn't. This year they decided to expand their horizons using a varsity basketball game to collect money to help the City of Flint.

ACTION President Owen Marr says he believes they are doing a good thing giving back to the community and the fundraiser to help Flint is a new thing added this year. "It was kind of a two-prong attack almost so we kind of so one thing we did was we collected change in the parking lots like after school because a lot of people have spare change in their cars and then at the basketball game it was Okemos and East Lansing and what we did was we kind of had a little bit of a competition between which school could raise more money and donate more money and so there was a three point contest so students could donate a dollar to enter in that and then parents donated money as well and we raised about $1,800.00."

The money raised will be donated to Flint Public Schools to help buy books for them and the other part will be donated to help buy sustainable solutions for Flint, such as water filters and helping with their infrastructure.

This is just one of the many fundraisers ACTION plans to host this year. Currently they are in the process of working on Chieftain Champs, an after-school program to help mentor struggling elementary and middle-school aged students, and a dodgeball tournament to help raise money for a charity still being decided on.