Sophomores Hannah B. and Liora G. of the Bi-Cultural Hebrew Academy want you to know that their recent Crumbl Cookie fundraiser wasn’t just about cookies.
“We were surprised that it was so successful,” Liora said. “We were thrilled to be able to raise so much money for the Paper Club.”
What does the Paper Club do, you may ask? Founded just this year by these two sophomore students, the Paper Club designs beautiful cards with uplifting messages of encouragement for children and teens in hospitals across the country. So far, their cards have provided hope and beauty not only to local kids, but their beautiful mitzvot have traveled as far as California.
“At the beginning of our project, the club members each put a paper with a state name in a bag,” Hannah said. “We chose one at random and that’s how we decided on California.”
Their recent fundraiser was selling Crumbl Cookies to the BCHA school community, which required over 12 hours of baking, decorating and organizing cookie deliveries to students, faculty, staff and families. The cookies were enjoyed over Shabbat and proved to be a great success for the club, as they will now be able to not only purchase materials for cards and postage, but also expand into goody bags for many of the patients whose days need the most brightening.
“We saw similar clubs online that reached out to seniors in isolation, and other groups whose lives were improved by these kinds of messages,” the girls explained, “but we decided to put our own twist on it, by thinking about people our own age and younger who are fighting illness and needed encouragement.”
While the cookies were sweet, the plan for the next phase of the Paper Club sounds even sweeter.
When asked about the club’s future, the girls confessed to having a succession plan in place. “We both have sisters who are in 8th grade,” Liora said, “so by the time we graduate, we hope they’ll be ready to take over, so in a way that would be our legacy.”
Everyone in the BCHA family hopes that the Paper Club will continue to deliver on the mitzvah of hope and healing, and that their founders will be blessed with their own wonderful kind of sweetness for many years to come.
