Siblings raise funds for Ecuador school

Two siblings from Niagara are proving that even if you’re small, you can still make a big difference.

These kids have been involved in giving back to the community for awhile now, like helping out at their local food bank.  But they’re now taking it a lot further.  Both under the age of ten, they’ve raised enough funds to help out kids in need all the way on the other side of the globe.

Flynn Kirwin may be small, but he’s a force to reckon with. At just nine-years of age, he and his four-year-old sister Ruby have raised more than 11-thousand dollars to build a school for children in Ecuador: “It’s worth doing because you’re helping other kids get an education.”

Ruby Kirwin: “Other kids have to have school so they can do science and make new friends.”

At first, Flynn wanted to give soccer balls to kids in developing countries. But it’s turned into much more. The school in rural Ecuador will house a total of one thousand students.

Phil Kirwin is the dad: “As they’ve grown older together, they’ve shown they’re very caring with each other and I think it doesn’t stop for them there. They see other people in different situations and they want to help.”

Ruby and Flynn used a crowd-funding source called Change Heroes to raise the money. It’s a fairly simple concept. You ask 33 people to donate $3.33 each day for three months, totalling roughly $300 per person. But the Change Heroes platform is different than most crowd funding forums. It focuses on building educational facilities in developing countries using the power of social media.

“Can you help us build a school?”

Ruby and Flynn created this video to send to potential donors and within 17 days, they had surpassed the target goal of 10-thousand dollars.

Taylor Conroy is the founder of Change Heroes: “They’ve realized the power they actually have to impact the world on a massive scale. That is my obsession is showing people that they have the ability to change the world and they have the ability to do it from their laptop from wherever they are in the world in a matter of days.”

Although she’s just starting out, Ruby has this bit of advice for others who may be interested in following in her small, but influential footsteps: “Little kids can make a difference.”

Ruby and Flynn are a little too young to help with the building of the school in Ecuador. But they will be visiting it once it’s completed around this time next year. Their parents are hoping to keep the momentum going by signing up other schools in the area to take on a similar project. To date, Change Heroes has built 120 schools in eight developing countries. They also build libraries.