23/12/2025
Can anyone tell me if this App is being used in Wirral, or Merseyside schools??
Thank You 🙏🏼
For two years, she ate lunch alone every day while classmates walked past her table. At 16, she created an app so no other kid would ever have to sit alone again.
Seventh grade. Natalie Hampton walked into the lunchroom carrying her tray, scanning the cafeteria for somewhere—anywhere—to sit.
Every table was full. Groups of friends laughing, talking, completely absorbed in their own conversations. She knew what would happen if she approached them. She'd tried before.
The rejection was instant. Public. Humiliating.
So she found an empty table in the corner and sat down alone. Again.
"When you walk into the lunchroom and you see all the tables of everyone sitting there and you know that going up to them would only end in rejection," Natalie later recalled, "you feel extremely alone and extremely isolated."
But sitting alone came with its own shame. Everyone could see her. Everyone knew she had no friends. The embarrassment was crushing.
This wasn't just loneliness. It was survival in the most hostile environment Natalie had ever experienced.
For two years—seventh and eighth grade—Natalie was brutally bullied at her private all-girls school in California. She was pushed into lockers. Sent threatening emails. Physically attacked four times in two weeks.
"I was coming home sobbing with bleeding red scratch marks down my face and bruises," she remembers.
When she reported the attacks to school administration, nothing happened. Instead, she was sent to a counselor to figure out why she was getting bullied—as if it was her fault, as if there was something wrong with her that invited violence.
Teachers did nothing. Students did nothing.
Every single day for two years, Natalie ate lunch completely alone.
The isolation nearly destroyed her. Her anxiety became so severe she had to be hospitalized. Her mother, Carolyn, calls it "the darkest period of our lives."
Finally, Natalie switched schools for ninth grade.
Everything changed immediately.
At her new school, students were kind. Inclusive. Welcoming. Natalie made friends quickly. For the first time in years, she felt safe.
But she couldn't stop thinking about the kids who were still trapped in what she'd escaped. The ones still sitting alone. Still getting rejected. Still too terrified to ask for help because they knew it would only make things worse.
And she kept thinking about what she'd desperately wanted during those two years: for just one person to walk up to her table and say, "Hey, are you OK? Come sit with us."
Those four words—"come sit with us"—stuck with her.
What if there was a way to connect kids who needed a place to sit with students willing to welcome them? But privately, so no one would know if you were reaching out. So you wouldn't risk public rejection.
At sixteen, Natalie designed an app called "Sit With Us."
Here's how it works: Students can sign up as "ambassadors"—people who commit to hosting "Open Lunches" where anyone can join their table. Other students using the app can browse available Open Lunches and find a welcoming group.
The genius of it: everything happens on the phone. Privately.
"This way it's very private. It's through the phone. No one else has to know," Natalie explained. "And you know that you're not going to be rejected once you get to the table."
You don't have to walk up to a group of popular kids and ask to sit down while they decide whether to let you. You don't have to face the public humiliation of rejection. You just check the app, see who's hosting an open lunch, and go.
Natalie had the idea. But she was sixteen years old with zero coding experience. So she pitched it to her parents "with a whole lot of jazz hands," as she puts it.
Her parents believed in her. Together, Natalie and her mother Carolyn became a team. They hired a freelance coder, and Natalie storyboarded every function, designed every feature, wrote every word of the ambassador pledge.
On September 9, 2016, "Sit With Us" launched.
Within one week, the app had 10,000 downloads.
Then the media noticed. NPR covered it. The Washington Post wrote about it. CBS News interviewed her. Ryan Seacrest donated $1,000 to support the app's development.
Messages poured in from around the world. Morocco. The Philippines. Australia. England. France. Kids everywhere who'd been eating lunch alone suddenly had hope.
Natalie's story resonated because everyone understands lunch table politics. Everyone remembers the terror of not knowing where to sit. Everyone has either experienced that isolation or witnessed it and done nothing.
And here was a sixteen-year-old who'd been through hell and decided to fix the problem herself.
The app wasn't just noble in theory—research backed it up.
A study by Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers University found that when popular middle schoolers were encouraged to combat bullying and given social media tools to help, there was a 30% reduction in disciplinary reports across 50 New Jersey schools.
Student-led intervention works. When peers stand up against exclusion, it changes school culture.
Natalie's app gave students a tool to do exactly that.
She became a TEDxTeen speaker. The United Nations named her an Outstanding Youth Delegate. She received the Mensa Foundation Copper Black Award. Suddenly, the girl who'd eaten alone for two years was speaking on international stages about inclusion and courage.
But what mattered most to Natalie wasn't the awards or the media attention.
It was the messages from kids telling her the app had changed their lives.
Kids who'd found friends. Kids who no longer dreaded lunchtime. Kids who finally felt like they belonged somewhere.
"Even if it changes the life of one person," Natalie said, "that'll make it all worth it for me."
Today, eight years after launch, "Sit With Us" is available in 30 countries. The app is still active. Natalie, now in her mid-twenties, is still CEO.
Thousands of students have used it to find lunch tables, make friends, and build the inclusive school communities Natalie wished she'd had.
But the app's real impact goes beyond lunch tables.
What Natalie created was a proof of concept: teenagers who've experienced pain don't have to stay victims. They can become problem-solvers. They can take their worst experiences and transform them into solutions that help others.
She took two years of isolation, anxiety, and physical violence and turned it into a global movement for inclusion.
"Using my story to help others has given me strength and confidence that I never knew that I had," she said.
That's the lesson buried in this story. Not just that bullying is terrible or that kids need support—we already know that.
The lesson is that the kids who've been through it are often the ones best equipped to fix it. They understand the problem in ways adults never will. They know exactly what's missing because they lived without it.
Natalie didn't wait for adults to solve lunch table isolation. She didn't wait to grow up and become a professional app developer. She was sixteen, had no coding experience, and built it anyway.
Because she remembered what it felt like to sit alone every single day, desperately hoping someone would notice.
Now, kids all over the world never have to feel that way.
They can open an app, find a welcoming table, and sit down knowing they won't be rejected.
All because a girl who spent two years eating alone decided no one else should ever have to.
