Last week, the popular photo series about everyday New Yorkers, “Humans of New York,” released a photo of a student who attends Mott Hall Bridges Academy, a middle school in Brownsville, NY.

“Who’s influenced you the most in your life?” asked Brandon Stanton, creator of “Humans of New York.” The boy responded, “My principal, Ms. Lopez.”

“How has she influenced you?” Stanton asked. “When we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter,” the boy answered.

In response to such a powerful statement about someone in the New York City community, especially in what Winnie Hu of The New York Times calls a “crime-plagued neighborhood,” Stanton launched a campaign to help Mott Hall Bridges Academy fund a trip to Harvard University. Stanton writes on his campaign page, “The goal of the trip is to broaden students’ horizons and expand their idea of their potential.”

The campaign has reached far beyond its original goal of simply funding a trip to the prestigious university, raising over $600,000 by Saturday alone.

In an email to CNN, Stanton wrote, “I ask people all the time about the most influential person in their life, and he was the first person who ever told me his principal.” He continued, “Then when I met Ms. Lopez, I could not have been more impressed. She is a force of nature. When she let me sit in on a staff meeting, I got a front-row seat to the challenges that her school faces, and I wanted to be involved in the solution,” he adds.

Later in the week, Stanton talked with Ms. Lopez and featured her picture in “Humans of New York.”

“This is a neighborhood that doesn’t necessarily expect much from our children, so at Mott Hall Bridges Academy we set our expectations very high. We don’t call the children ‘students,’ we call them ‘scholars.’ Our color is purple. Our scholars wear purple and so do our staff, because purple is the color of royalty,” Lopez told Stanton.

She continued, “I want my scholars to know that even if they live in a housing project, they are part of a royal lineage going back to great African kings and queens. They belong to a group of individuals who invented astronomy and math. And they belong to a group of individuals who have endured so much history and still overcome. When you tell people you’re from Brownsville, their face cringes up. But there are children here that need to know that they are expected to succeed.”

The fact that the post by “Humans of New York” has been shared over 138,000 times and liked more than one million times, shows how something positive on social media can affect millions of people and sometimes drive them to help and contribute to their communities and their neighborhoods.

Drawing praise city-wide, Ms. Carmen Fariña, the current New York City Schools Chancellor, said, “Mott Hall Bridges Academy is proving that any school — no matter its ZIP code — can deliver a great education for its students.”

 Correction January 31, 2015

The name of The New York Times writer is Winnie Hu, not Hu Winnie.