A 10-Year-Old Girl Sent Over 1,500 Art Kits To Kids Who Are Quarantining While In Foster Care
Talk about a girl with a big heart.
It turns out, kids have no qualms about leading the example when it comes to selflessness and kindness in today’s time of uncertainty. While so many of us bemoan our lack of access to entertainment, friends, and personal care, young generations are looking to offer support where they can. Just look at this 10-year-old from Danbury, Connecticut who understands the importance of empathy, compassion, and love during this time of quarantine.
She worked on a pretty big project to make sure kids her age felt all three.
Chelsea Phaire has spent her time in quarantine sending kits to more than 1,500 children in homeless shelters and foster care homes.
Phaire explained in a recent interview with CNN that she wanted to create the kits to give children something to look forward to and feel positive about. Phaire’s art kits include paper, coloring books, markers, crayons, and colored pencils. They are being sent to schools and shelters across the country as part of an organization founded by Phaire and her parents called Chelsea’s Charity.
“Since she was seven, she was begging me and her dad to start a charity,” Candace Phaire, Phaire’s mother, told CNN. “She was so persistent, every couple of months she would ask, ‘Are we starting Chelsea’s Charity yet?’ When she was turning 10, she asked us again, and we decided it was time to go for it.”
Set to enter the 6th grader this coming fall, Phaire and her parents launched Chelsea’s Charity on her birthday in August 2019.
At the time, Phaire asked party guests to donate art supplies to the charity instead of giving her birthday gifts. Soon after her birthday party, Phaire made the decision to use all of the donations she’d been given to send out her first 40 art kits. The kits were collected and sent to a homeless shelter in New York. It wasn’t long before Phaire and her parents set up an Amazon wishlist account for the art supplies.
Before the pandemic, Phaire and her mother delivered almost 1,000 kits to kids in foster care homes, homeless shelters, women’s shelters, and schools impacted by gun violence.
At the time, Phaire and her mother traveled around to give kids their kits in person. Since the start of the pandemic, however they’ve mailed the kits. “I feel good inside knowing how happy they are when they get their art kits,” Phaire explained. “I have definitely grown as a person because of this. Now my dream is to meet every kid in the entire world and give them art. Who knows, maybe if we do that and then our kids do that, we’ll have world peace!”
