Rockford — Fourth-grader Ava Chatel is only around 4 feet, 3 inches tall, but her reach stretches around the world.
Ava is a student in Kathryn Humphreys’ class at Belmont Elementary, and like all her fellow K-5 students, she tries each year to help the Belmont PTO with its annual Shine Bright fundraiser, which helps pay for field trips, celebrations and various special activities throughout the year.
When the time came to lend a hand this year, Ava decided to look beyond just the Rockford community, challenging herself to get donations from as many states as possible. Then she broadened the outlook even further, taking her philanthropy to an international level.
By the time the two-week fundraiser wrapped up Sept. 27, Ava had collected donations from 48 states and 16 counties, including Qatar, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Scotland, England, the Netherlands and Cyprus.
She raised $2,235 — more than 11 times her initial $200 goal, and about 17% of the $13,000 total raised by students this year.
“I kinda carried my class,” Ava said with a shy smile. “I thought it was so cool because I did not think I could get all these. I did not think I was going to get as far as, like, Australia.”
Going International
What inspired Ava to aim for such a lofty goal?
Well, she loves maps and she loves coloring, and a worldwide fundraising effort offers a lot of opportunities for coloring in different states and countries. With a map of the U.S., and one of the world, Ava used multicolored markers to shade in the states and countries that donated.
“I just thought it would be fun to color in a map of the entire world,” Ava said.
She’s also competitive, and she cares deeply about her school, explained Ava’s mom, Taryn Chatel.
‘You just love somebody who takes initiative and somebody who cares about her school, and cares about doing good and having fun with it. It was hard not to dive right in with her.’
— fourth-grade teacher Kathryn Humphreys
And how did she do it?
She had a bit of help from Taryn, who’s on the PTO, and from Humphreys. Both have connections to people in other states and countries, and when they learned of Ava’s goal, they gave a little nudge to some of their acquaintances, asking them to consider donating.
But Ava did the bulk of the work. She’s a budding comedian and influencer — she already has about 1,000 followers on the Coverstar kids social-media platform — and she used her social-media skills to aid in the search for donations. She recorded and edited videos promoting the fundraiser, which Taryn uploaded to the Belmont PTO’s Facebook page.
The PTO and the school community shared the videos and helped spread the word. It spread far and wide.
“It was just so much engagement, and I think it just (built) off of Ava’s enthusiasm and the videos that she made,” said Brad Chatel, Ava’s father.
And Ava got to color in plenty of states and countries along the way. Of the U.S. states, she only missed Delaware and Arkansas. But, hey, maybe next year.
She said she was shocked at how responsive people were to her campaign. She still can’t quite believe how much she was able to accomplish.
“I was like, ‘Why would someone donate that much money to a child that’s in fourth grade?’ And it turned into a big thing, and now the whole school knows me and I am famous,” she said, with a not-so-shy smile this time.
Humphreys said Ava’s energy and ambition were contagious, and that all her classmates were rooting for her.
“It’s amazing,” Humphreys said. “You just love somebody who takes initiative and somebody who cares about her school, and cares about doing good and having fun with it. It was hard not to dive right in with her.”
“It’s hard to not be enthusiastic when she’s enthusiastic,” Taryn added. “And competitive. I think that’s part of the drive, too. She just wanted to do her best and that was pretty cool.”
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