Seventeen-year-old Lauren Hashiguchi of Beaverton, Ore., lost her grandfather in a car crash caused by a teen driver. Sixteen-year-old Jessica Mann of Greensboro, N.C., says her friend died in a late night head-on collision when she swerved into oncoming traffic.

Mourning the loss of loved ones isn’t the only thing these teens have in common. They’re on a mission, along with 44 other teen leaders from across the country, to take on the No. 1 killer of teens — car crashes — through a teen movement they’re leading called “Keep the Drive”’ funded by The Allstate Foundation.

Nearly 6,000 teens die each year in car crashes, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Crashes cause more teen deaths each year than drugs, violence or suicide. Other than the summer (May through August), October is the deadliest month for teen drivers.

To reduce the statistics, the national teen leaders are participating in “Keep the Drive U.S.A.”…,

Eileen will never forget the morning she stopped by her daughter’s house, and heard her 2-year-old granddaughter crying upstairs in her crib. She zipped up the stairs to tend to her and was rewarded with Anna’s engaging smile for “grammy.”

It was all that much sweeter because Eileen couldn’t have zipped up those stairs a few months earlier. Eileen, 68, had such pain in her right knee that the things she loved most, including babysitting for her grandchildren, going to the theater and dinner with friends, and even walks in the park had become impossible. …

Army Spec. Michael Hilliard’s unit had been searching houses in Baghdad, looking for weapons and insurgents. After finding a cache of weapons and ammunition and detaining some people, they were leaving a house when it came under fire.

“The next thing I know,” says the Phoenix resident, “I’m waking up with the medic pressing a bandage to my head.”

Hilliard is lucky to be alive. …

It’s 5 a.m. and Randy Smith arrives through the back door for volunteer duty at the Second Harvest Soup Kitchen. By 6 a.m., Smith finishes chopping up vegetables and meat and begins adding the ingredients to six 15-quart kettles of boiling stock. The kitchen opens its doors by 11 to serve today’s homemade soup and fresh baked bread to 100 hungry souls.

Smith volunteers more than 250 hours a year with Second Harvest — hours of his free time, off the clock, donated to the cause.

Until now.

Through the Ball Community Ambassador program, Smith now earns $20 per hour for his volunteer hours, which he, in turn, donates back to the soup kitchen. Last year, Ball employees logged more than 18,000 volunteer hours to support causes of their choice. At $20 per hour or $36,000, that’s enough for one food bank to purchase 500,000 meals for hungry families in the 40 communities where Ball operates.

Six-year-old Amanda’s screams ricocheted off every corner of her mother’s barren kitchen, each wail bouncing back more loudly.

Wendy Langley sat at the dinner table and caressed her daughter’s head and tried desperately to calm her. But there was no calm, only chaos.

Moments earlier, Langley, a confident, single mom, followed the directions on a popular everyday product from the drug store and poured a watery substance that smelled like bug spray onto her child’s tender scalp. Even with tiny Amanda holding a large folded towel to her forehead, some of the burning liquid seeped into her eyes.

That nightmare prompted the young mother to set a course that would eventually flip the lice industry on its head.

“All I could think about was the number of parents out there who were facing the same horrible ordeal that I did,” said Langley.

She became empowered by the desire to help her daughter, and the millions of parents looking for a non-toxic and safe alternative to killing head lice.