A 7-year-old African American girl is taking a step towards educating her fellow students about diversity, by donating multicultural crayons and books featuring diverse characters to some schools in the United States.
Madison Wilson began her fundraising project “Help Fill Madi’s Treasure Box” with the help of her mother Vashti Tameka Wilson. Madison aims to donate “[1,000] crayon boxes and 500 books with all sorts of main characters,” by raising funds until July 15, 2020, as per her GoFundMe page.
“Sometimes, there are only books with peach kids, and there should be books with brown kids like me too,” Madison said.
The fundraiser has raised over $19,200 (over P951,000), as of this writing, just a few hundred dollars shy of her $20,000-goal (over P990,000).
Madison apparently got the idea for the initiative after noticing the lack of representation of people of color in movies and literature. Vashti encouraged her child and helped her make the crowdfunding page, as per Good Morning America on July 1.
The child will donate 15 books and 24 boxes of crayons per classroom for every $2,500 (over P123,000) she raises.
“She’s one of three black children in her entire school,” Vashti was quoted as saying. “She said crayons are either too dark or too light for her and so she wanted all the kids to be able to find something that would match them.”