From Mikey:

When Mikey was 6 and Matt was 3, my mom and dad asked us to clean up our playroom. My mom seemed a little more upset than usual when she asked us to do that, she was annoyed that there was a lot of stuff that we didn’t play with anymore and broken toys. She told us we needed to appreciate and respect our toys because there were plenty of kids who didn’t have as much as we do. So when we cleaned up the room, we found toys we never opened and instead of opening them or selling them, Matt and I decided to donate the toys to kids who really didn’t have anything. This made us both want to help more, so I asked my first grade class to do what we did and see if they had anything to donate. In less than a month, we got about 40 toy donations. Over the next year, my parents helped me and my brother look into different ways to help our community but everything was set by our age. It was very frustrating because I know that we can do so much more than what we were being allowed to do. And that wasn’t fair. So in 2015 instead of doing what we did before, my parents helped us start a real nonprofit organization called Malek Brothers Project Playroom and it’s run completely by Matthew and myself. It’s a real nonprofit started by kids for kids and run by kids. My mom only signs paperwork for us because we can’t do that yet and drives us around when we need her to. My brother and I went door to door every day afterschool for two or three hours for about a month and a half and we went out to different neighborhoods over the weekends spreading the word and passing out flyers. Some people were nice and gave us toys they had already bought or money towards our nonprofit. By the time it was time to hand in the donations to Monroe County Youth Services, we had almost $1,000 and over 100 toy donations. If two kids can do that in a month, think about what ten or twenty kids could do in a month.

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Please consider helping us this year, whether its going door to door, helping us shop or helping us deliver toys!