Of all the people I could be writing about now, the only two I care to are named Sierra Dunn and Ashley Prince. They make you feel like there may be hope, after all.
Sierra is 16 years old. Ashley is 17. Both of them wept when they saw something horrific happen in the world. And they did not just flick off the TV. They decided to act.
Two days had passed since the Jan. 12 earthquake devastated Haiti. They were walking down a hallway at Monarch High School in Louisville, where they are juniors, turned to each other and, almost simultaneously, said: “We have to do something.”
“That day, I had seen the pain in the face of one of our teachers and thought, if this is affecting me and others so much, we just had to do something,” Ashley said.
“Kids are always waiting for someone to start something,” Sierra added. “Well, why not us?”
They went to Scott Cawlfield, the assistant principal, to flesh out their idea. They decided to draw up a poster with the usual “How Much We’ve Raised” thermometer, and plaster it with photographs of Haitian earthquake victims.
They would place it at a table just inside the front doors and sit there with plastic buckets begging for donations.
They would do the same outside basketball games and wrestling matches. They agreed there needed to be a goal and a sense of urgency attached to it all.
Three thousand dollars sounded like a nice, round number. And they would give themselves only nine days to raise it, upping the time pressure on the 1,500 Monarch students.
They manned the table and the buckets as kids arrived in the morning. At lunchtime, they shifted to the doors leading into the cafeteria.
“We were putting out the message that they NEEDED to donate,” Ashley said. “We got a lot of ‘nos.’ We heard every excuse. But in the end, everyone came through.”
Outside of games, they cornered parents, Ashley working the tables even before her own varsity basketball games. Their biggest cash hauls came from the games.
“We started to slide for a while, maybe starting the fifth day,” Ashley said. “We saw the same kids at lunch, who got tired of us chasing them down.”
Teachers, though, began putting buckets in their own classrooms, some giving extra-credit points depending on the donation amount.
Ashley’s mother, Earla Stewart, baked about 200 cookies for the girls to hand out to anyone making a donation of at least $1.
On Thursday, the two girls presented a check for $2,740 to Capt. Ron McKinney of the Salvation Army, the charity they selected largely because all of the money will be used in Haiti, none taken for administrative costs.
“When you’re talking $2,700 American, that will go so far in Haiti, it is unbelievable,” McKinney told the girls. “This is going to serve hundreds of thousands of people because of what you have done.”
“I always wanted to do something to help other people,” Ashley explained later. “It makes me feel good to know that two girls can make a big difference.”
“Even though you are one person,” Sierra Dunn said, “you really can do something; you can amaze yourself with what you can do.
“You just have to believe in yourself.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
