St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital treats kids with cancer free of charge, and doctors and scientists are on the leading edge of cancer research.
I was inspired by St. Jude and I was inspired by kids who have pediatric cancer and fell in love with the fact that they treat kids for free. So when I was nine years old, I decided to start a fundraiser of my own.
News Reporter: She’s a young fundraiser delivering big time with her feet.
So in the beginning when I was nine and I first started it, my goal was honestly just to raise $50. I learned how to set up a website and a social media account, and I just said, Hey, I’m gonna be juggling every day of the summer, and in exchange, I want you to donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
You can donate a dollar per juggle. So I started with only getting about three juggles, and then slowly but surely I would get around 10 and then a hundred and then 200, and then all of a sudden I could get 1000 juggles. And the money and juggling just started to grow and grow. We were at $10,000 and then with more outreach and more emails and more social media posts started to raise $30,000, and then we reached a hundred thousand dollars.
People who donated really saw my passion. I didn’t just do this every month or every week. I would do this every single day. Six years later, my record is 4,202 consecutive juggles, and I’ve raised over $450,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
I created the Juggling for Jude challenge to inspire more people to participate. We’re seeing soccer teams do it. We’re seeing professional athletes, and so this has been such an incredible way to see my little fundraiser turn into a worldwide effort.