It's All for a Good Cause

While my dad was taking care of all the paperwork, my mom and I were working out how our company could help other kids.  When we decided to make guardian angel dolls, we wanted it to be more than just another doll.  We wanted to create a way that these angels could be brought to life, so to speak.  How could we enable them to help?  After all, isn’t that what we think of when we hear “guardian angel”?  Isn’t an angel meant to bring comfort, make us feel that someone has our back?  How could these angels help kids? (that last part is from our brochure)

The first thing we thought about was helping kids in hospitals.  My mom is from Pittsburg and one of the leading transplant hospitals for children is in Pittsburg.  So we thought, wouldn’t it be great if each kid having transplant surgery got a doll?  But then we thought that was too specific to just the Pittsburg area.  Some people in Arizona might want a doll to go to a kid in an Arizona hospital.  So then we thought about all the different children’s hospitals all over the country.  But that was too big.  How were we going to be able to get every kid in every hospital a doll?

Then my mom remembered about a friend of hers that flies to Africa all the time to help kids with Aids.  He also works with a charity called the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.  They help kids all over the world that suffer from this disease.  This was perfect.  We could donate some of the money we make from each doll to different children’s charities.  My mom and I did a search for ‘A’ rated children’s charities.  A rated means that most of the money that you donate goes to the people who need it.  Some charities spend a lot of money on things like offices and administration, while only a small portion of the donated money actually goes to the people who need it.  So along with Elizabeth Glaser, (which is an A rated charity), we also found Children Incorporated and Child Find of America. Children Incorporated helps impoverished kids with things like food, clothes and education.  Child Find of America helps reunite missing and abducted children with their families.

 

So how do we get kids involved in helping other kids?  We decided that each kid that gets a guardian angel doll also gets a secret code with that doll.  That kid gets to go on our website to register their doll and then they get to pick the charity that they want the money to go to.  Then we send that money to that charity.  The kid can feel like their angel has their back while they get to have another kids back.

 

Now there is some more legal stuff you have to do.  You can’t just say, “we’re going to give some money to charity”.  You have to have a legal agreement with each charity that you want to associate with.  There was one other charity that we wanted to use as a donation choice, but they said we had to guarantee them $250,000 to be associated with them.  So instead of 4 charities we have 3.  But we have 3 great charities that cover 3 different ways to help kids.