Colorado 10-Year-Old Raises Over $160,000 For Pediatric Disease Research

Three years in the past, then-seven-year-old Dana Perella had by no means baked a cookie. That each one modified when she discovered that her good friend Mila had been recognized with a uncommon and deadly illness known as Batten. Dana needed to assist fundraise for a remedy and, realizing that individuals like cookies, she baked a giant batch, loaded up her crimson wagon, and offered the baked items door-to-door in her Boulder neighborhood. She stored going till she met her aim of elevating $1,000 for Batten analysis. Nevertheless it didn’t really feel like sufficient. At the moment, Dana’s candy efforts have resulted in an official nonprofit known as Cookies4Cures. She and her workforce of volunteers have baked 20,236 cookies to this point and raised $161,270 to fund analysis into 5 uncommon pediatric ailments.

“I nonetheless have bother believing that quantity,” Dana says. Though some cookie gross sales nonetheless happen through wagon, the Cookies4Cures fundraising operation has expanded into Boulder pop-ups, throughout which Dana units up exterior of grocery shops and eating places, buying and selling baked items for donations. Her pitch? “Take as many cookies as you need and donate what makes your coronary heart really feel good.”

Moreover offering a sugar repair and elevating cash for good causes, Dana can be boosting consciousness for the rarest ailments, those that don’t get a lot consideration however nonetheless have an effect on youngsters in her group, like Mila, who handed away earlier this month. Dana is in a struggle in opposition to time for different mates, like three-year-old Sophie Rosenberg, who has a rare genetic disorder called multicentric carpotarsal osteolysis (MCTO).

“Dana is one in every of our greatest mates at this level—she is really a hero,” says Lauren Feder Rosenberg, Sophie’s mother and co-owner of Boulder eating places Santo and Blackbelly. Dana hosts month-to-month cookie pop-ups exterior of Santo (the subsequent is on March 14 from 10 a.m.–1 p.m.) to fund MCTO analysis by means of Sophie’s nonprofit, Sophie’s Neighborhood. Rosenberg says: “We’re so grateful for all of the love that goes into Dana’s enterprise, which is pushed by some spectacular work by her mother, Alexis Perella. The 2 of them have been a serious consolation for us and our most hands-on supporters since we began our nonprofit after receiving Sophie’s scary prognosis. What Dana is doing is so particular. What number of 10-year-olds are keen to work laborious to alter the futures of their friends? It’s superb.”

Dana has raised greater than $11,000 for Sophie’s Neighborhood along with her cookie gross sales and simply hit a aim of amassing $50,000 for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) analysis, a debilitating illness afflicting her good friend Ben. “That’s analysis that’s occurring as a result of a bunch of children acquired collectively and offered a bunch of cookies,” mother Alexis says.

To assist Dana and her cookie campaign to remedy uncommon pediatric ailments, you possibly can donate through her Gofundme page, the place each greenback goes to assist fund therapies, or volunteer for Cookies4Cures as a baker. Should you reside in Boulder or might be close by on a cookie pop-up day, you may also order cookies for choose up.

Each Dana and Alexis really feel fortunate to be ready to assist households fundraise for therapies and cures. “We’re lucky that we’ve got the bandwidth to have the ability to assist with out being fairly so within the trenches,” Alexis says. “Should you have a look at Sophie’s household, her mother and father are put within the place the place they’re caring for a child with particular wants and attempting to lift hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to create a remedy that’s by no means been accomplished earlier than. Cookies4Cures helps by offering an avenue for fundraising for some of these endeavors. Children with actually complicated, ongoing medical wants, after which their households are additionally elevating cash on prime of it…we’re lucky to have the ability to assist.”

Dana hopes to sometime have Cookies4Cures campaigns for each uncommon pediatric illness on the market. And for kids seeking to assist change the world round them, the 10-year-old has two items of recommendation: “First, consider in your self. You possibly can’t get wherever with out believing you possibly can. The second is to simply begin. There are a thousand issues that may go improper, however most of them aren’t going to occur and there’ll all the time be issues you don’t anticipate. Should you simply carry on planning perpetually, you’ll by no means get to really make a distinction.”

You’ll find the Gofundme web page for Cookies4Cures here. Its subsequent cookie pop up might be at Santo (1265 Alpine Ave., Boulder) on Sunday, March 14 from 10 a.m.–1 p.m.