The Littlest Volunteers
Written By Jeff Wagenheim
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Grand Prize
Dakota's Dream:
Sydney and Erin Duggan, ages 11 and 8, Olmsted Falls, Ohio
It was June 2007 and Dan Duggan had just returned home from his daughter Sydney's soccer game. He immediately asked his younger daughter Erin about a girl he'd seen on the sideline wearing a walking brace. The players had made a fuss over the girl, who looked about Erin's age. Dan wondered if Erin knew her. "Yes, Dakota's my friend from school," Erin replied. "She's dying."
Dan was taken aback by how matter-of-factly his daughter spoke of Dakota Bihn, whose sister Bailey was one of Sydney's teammates. At 6, Dakota was diagnosed with juvenile-onset Tay-Sachs, a degenerative neurological condition with no treatment or cure. It is extremely rare and has always proved fatal.
"What are you going to do about it?" Dan prodded his daughter. Erin gave her dad a quizzical look. "I can't do anything," she said. "I'm just a kid." "Well, what would you be willing to do?" This time Erin didn't hesitate: "We'll do anything." She was speaking for herself and her friends. Dakota's friends.
Dan and his wife Sharlene met with Ken and Julie Bihn, Dakota's parents, to brainstorm ways kids in the community could help – fitting, since Tay-Sachs almost always affects children. The Bihns had recently created the Cure Tay-Sachs Foundation, and the couples agreed on a kid-driven fund-raiser dubbed Dakota's Dream.
Erin, Sydney, and a core group of around 15 friends talked up the idea to schoolmates, who talked it up to others . . . until some 250 kids were on board to ring doorbells and ask for donations on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. In the weeks prior, volunteers visited hundreds of stores asking to leave donation cans and put up posters. "The first few businesses we went to, an adult would go in too," says Sharlene Duggan. "Pretty soon we just stayed outside. Who could say no to these kids?"
By November 24, the Cure Tay-Sachs Foundation had raised nearly $50,000. More than $3,000 of it was generated by Erin and Sydney, and not just by knocking on doors. Both girls had birthdays around that time, and they told relatives that a donation would be the perfect gift. "Having no presents to open? I didn't mind at all because I knew I was helping Dakota," says Erin. "I want to raise lots of money to find a cure. I don't want a friend of mine to go away and my sister's friend to be unhappy." "At the lowest point in our life, we feel like we've been lifted onto the shoulders of our friends," Julie Bihn says of the commun- ity's efforts. "It gives us strength when we want to just crawl into a corner and cry."
Another fund-raiser took place in September, and the Bihns were not surprised that Erin and Sydney were involved. As Ken Bihn wrote in the family's blog, "The whole concept of kids going door to door for Dakota's Dream was born of Erin's efforts to help her friend Dakota. When the other kids might run around and play, Erin stays by Dakota since Dakota can't run with everyone else. She does not want Dakota to be lonely."
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