ASHLEE SMITH

You may be wondering ‘who is Ashlee Smith?’ For all of us living in Northern California and Northern Nevada, she is our very own local girl doing good!! I have mentioned before that I like to read the section in People Magazine titled Heroes Among Us, well when I picked up the June 2, 2008 edition by Howard Breuer,  I noticed the person that was highlighted was a girl from Reno, Nevada! 9 year old Ashlee Smith. Truly this was a heart warming story. At such a young age she was already thinking how to help those in need, what inspired her? Her own misfortune when a house fire ravaged her family’s home in September 2005. Ashlee lost everything, toy horses, stuffed animals, books, remember being a child and how those toys meant so much to you. Now fast forward two years when her dad Matt, a firefighter was helping to put out the Lake Tahoe fire that leveled 250 homes, it was at that moment that Ashlee thought of the children. She knew she wanted to help them because she knows all too well what it is like to lose all your toys and knows how important toys are to children. Seriously what an inspiration Ashlee is, not only to other children but to all of us. So many of us that suffer the same loses as others, may say ‘man I know how they feel’ and then that’s it we end up going about our day as usual. Not Ashlee, she set out with her cause and has collected and handed out more than 10,000 donated toys to youngsters whose homes have been damaged or destroyed by fires, floods and other natural or man-made disasters in the Reno-Tahoe area. Her kindness has reached so many and get this even while on vacation at Walt Disney World she was thinking of others, the Fernley floods were happening so the day she got back from vacation she launched a 10 week toy drive, recruiting 30 volunteers and collecting 1,000 books and hundreds of toys for kids who had lost theirs. What a selfless sweet girl. Ashlee now has a website to help promote her cause, www.ashleestoycloset.org it’s this kind of compassion that helps this to be A Wonderful Life!

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