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Troup High School students are doing their part to help underserved schools on the other side of the world.

THS Ambassadors Miles Ivey, Will Keeter and Bop Tucker lead the Nepal Project, which is raising funds involved raising funds for schools in Nepal.

Paul Hammock, instructor for the ambassador class at THS, said the idea came from a friend of his, who is from Nepal, that helps raise money to improve schools in the country.

“We were talking about it one day, and I thought that maybe my school’s leadership program could help do something to help out,” Hammock said. “I brought the idea to my class, and my class voted to do something for the project.”

Hammock said the boys got excited about the project and stepped up to lead, create, organize and executed the project.

“To raise funds, they had the idea to create a teacher versus students basketball game,” Hammock said. “They organized it, planned it, talked to teachers, reached out to administration to get approval and worked with them to have times and security for the game to take place.”

Ivey said putting together the project was easy, but selling the tickets and working through loopholes was the hardest part.

“The basketball game was amazing but what was even better was seeing the results we had from donating that money,” Ivey said. “It was great seeing all of our planning pay off.”

Hammock said the game sold over 600 tickets at $3 apiece, totaling roughly $2,000 raised for the project.

The proceeds from the ticket sales funded projects in Kathmandu, Nepal. The Ambassadors worked with a Nepalese organization called Collaborative Schools Network to execute these projects.

Collaborative Schools Network is a nonprofit that adopts and manages existing public schools in Nepal and transforms the quality of education for the country’s poorest children.

“We were able to transfer the money through a US Nepalese organization called Daayitwa US/ Nepal Rising,” Hammock said.

The transfer rate of US currency to the Nepalese rupee was worth a lot, Hammock said.

“Our kids submitted a couple of different project proposals to us and then picked through all the project proposals seeing which ones they felt was going to be the best and chose a library and a playground,” Hammock said.

He said the money raised stretched further than planned.

“Initially, we were just going to do the library, but we were able to do both,” Hammock said. “My kids were really happy with that because we didn’t expect to raise that much money. We raised a good bit, and it was cool to be able to put it to good use.”

Keeter said the best part of the project was the result.

“Knowing that we put something together that’s going to be fun for students and also knowing that we raised money to help build a library and the playground for children in Nepal felt rewarding,” Keeter said.

Tucker said seeing everyone come together for a good cause was cool.

“We created the idea of the fundraiser to help the school in Nepal and recently saw pictures of the library and playground from the school, and it looked great,” Tucker said.