Second-grader sells over $4K in keychains for students’ lunch debt

February 5th, 2020 Stories

A selfless 8-year-old boy from Washington raised more than $4,000 to cover other students’ lunch debt — simply by selling handmade key chains, according to a new report.

Keoni Ching, a student at Benjamin Franklin Elementary in Vancouver, was able to make the noble gesture after selling hundreds of keychains — at $5 each — to multiple buyers across the country, CNN reported.

He raised $4,015 to erase the lunch debt for students from his own school and six others, according to the report.

The idea came about because Keoni wanted to do something special for his school’s “Kindness Week,” and brainstormed ideas with his mother, April, and father, Barry, the network reported.

He was inspired by San Francisco 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman, formerly of the Seattle Seahawks, who donated more than $26,000 to cover students’ lunch debt.

Keoni told CNN he settled on the keychains idea because, “I love key chains. They look good on my backpack.”

As word of Keoni’s cause started circulating, people from several different states reached out to purchase the custom chains, his mother said.

“We have sent keychains to Alaska, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Arizona, all over the country,” April Ching told the network. “There was one lady who said she wanted $100 worth of key chains so that she could just hand them out to people.”

“There were several people who bought one key chain and gave [Keoni] a hundred bucks,” she added. “It was absolutely amazing how much support the community showed for his whole project.”

Of the $4,015 Keoni raised, his own school will use $1,000 of it to pay off its $500 lunch debt and any future debt incurred, according to the report. Six other schools in the area will get $500 each to erase their own lunch debts.

“Lunches here are about $2,” Woody Howard, principal of Benjamin Franklin Elementary, told CNN. “But if you have two or three kids and for whatever reason, you’ve missed [paying for] a week of lunch or breakfasts, that adds up pretty quickly. This type of a gift takes a little bit of pressure off of your family.”

While Keoni hasn’t followed the political conversation around school lunch debt, he told CNN his gesture simply “makes the world a better place.”

Article Source: Second-grader sells over $4K in keychains for students’ lunch debt