Madeleine Lippey is in many ways a typical teenage girl: She loves Taylor Swift, watches chick flicks with her friends, worries about exams, and has started thinking about college.

In other ways she’s not at all typical. She has grown up in the rarefied air of Greenwich, Conn., with international travel and private schools. But the passion of her life — what makes her blue eyes light up and her words tumble over each other — lies elsewhere, in the townships of South Africa, the slums of India, and the lives of teens in the Middle East.

To bring these voices together, Lippey, who’s just 15, has founded a nonprofit, online literary magazine, The Do Write Campaign. So far, it has drawn more than 1,000 submissions of writing, photography, and artwork from kids in the US, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

“And 12,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook,” adds Lippey.

The 10th grader is sitting in her tiny dorm room at Phillips Academy, the Andover prep school whose alumni include Oliver Wendell Holmes and both Bush presidents. On her “wall of inspiration,” as she calls it, is a collage of family photos and favorite sayings, from Audrey Hepburn to the Buddha. Her favorite is from Confucius: “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

It is advice Lippey tries to live by. Born in Hong Kong to investment bankers parents (he worked for Goldman Sachs, she for J.P. Morgan; they’ve both since left banking), Lippey has traveled widely. The summer of 2010 found her in Dharamsala, India, working in a school where dirt-caked children sat on rags on the floor. It was there that she realized everyone can touch lives far different from their own.

Lippey made a documentary and wrote a column on her experiences for the local newspaper, which she ended by challenging readers to look deeply at themselves and question the materialism that suffuses many American lives.