25 Days... Can you Make a Difference

Laura, a 10-year old girl from New York, has recently created a blog titled "25 Days to Make a Difference", where she has told of her plans to do little things to help those around her for the first 25 days of December, as well as what she has done on each day so far. At this point, she has performed many small but meaningful deeds for many people and even animals, such as cleaning her fishbowl, donating spare change to the Salvation Army, and writing a message to her school's lunch monitors thanking them for all of their hard work. Her original goal was to encourage some people to try to better the holiday season for a few others, and give a $25 donation to the one who donated the most. She was completely astounded when she discovered the huge amount of people that actually committed to making a difference. When I read this, I felt really good, knowing that people can use technology to help others and make many people feel better. I believe sites like this can really encourage people to get involved in their communities and really help to make the lives of many much better. People like us can take her advice by simply doing small things like helping out around the house, taking the time to thank somebody for their hard work which would normally go unnoticed, and possibly even creating our own blogs about helping others on any scale. Personally, I'm planning on asking my parents what I can do to help them around the house, as I've seen that they have a ton of work to do for their jobs lately, in addition to caring for my siblings and me. Also, I've received a good amount of money from Chanukah presents, and, after reading Laura's blog, I'm definitely planning on donating that to charity, possibly to the AIDS Relief Fundraiser currently going on in our high school. For a class project, we could possibly contact a local charity and create a site where people could donate money or sign up to help out there, to really help those in need. Overall, I believe Laura's site was a fantastic idea, and she's really helping out as much as she can. It's good to know there are people like her out there, those who sometimes don't get the recognition they deserve. In the future, we should all try to change that.