Donor’s gift offers kids inspiration to dream big
Kamala Harris dolls donated to students
More than 100 Marin City students have received Kamala Harris action figure dolls donated by a benefactor in Kentfield.
“This means a lot to all of us — especially to me and my daughter,” said Kim Magsipoc of Marin City, whose two children, Cameron and Camora Lewis, received the doll last week. “My daughter said, ‘She looks like me.'”
Magsipoc, who is Filipino and shares an Asian-American heritage with the vice president
elect, said her kids were two of 120 students at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy who received the dolls Dec. 17 as gifts from Lisa Bernard Rosenberg of Kentfield.
Rosenberg, a volunteer with the “Bags of Love” program that distributed food to needy Marin City families early on in the pandemic, said she gave the students the action figures “so they can look at the doll and believe they can do great things, vying historical obstacles, just like Bay Area native Kamala Harris did.”
Rosenberg, a former Bay Area TV news reporter who once covered Harris, also passed on a message to the kids from the 56-yearold senator, a former state attorney general and San Francisco district attorney.
The message, sent via a Harris staff person, was: “Don't let anyone else define you. You define yourself.”
David Finnane, the school principal, said he welcomed the gift as “an opportunity to remind our kids that they can be anything they want to be.”
He said his students can find inspiration from the dolls in that they represent Harris's historic achievement as the first Black woman and first AsianAmerican woman to be elected a U. S. vice president.
“The action figures are a tangible thing to remind them of the possibilities that stand before them if they work hard, believe in themselves and take care of each other,” Finnane said Wednesday.
Rosenberg, who has attended Black Lives Matter rallies and who took her three children to Alabama for a civil rights trip in the spring, said she first saw the Harris action figure in a Facebook post in early November.
“I saw an image of a little African American girl holding a Kamala doll, three days after Biden and Harris were declared the winners,” she said. “This little girl had this enormous smile on her face. It just stuck with me.”
Rosenberg said she wanted to give one of the action figures to other little girls “just so they hold that doll and think, ‘ I'm a girl, I'm of color, and it doesn't matter.'”
Rosenberg tex ted Finnane, whom she knew because her son, a student at Redwood High School in Larkspur, is a volunteer at Bridge the Gap College Prep, an after- school academic enrichment program in Marin City that works with students from Bayside MLK.
Finnane told Rosenberg he would welcome the gift, but that boys at the school could also use a positive role model in an action figure.
osenberg contacted the Brooklyn manufacturer to purchase the dolls at $19 apiece. She ordered 120 for the whole school.
Magsipoc said her son Cameron really likes his Harris action figure.
“He really loves politics — he was so happy when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won,” she said.
“The doll,” Magsipoc said she told her son, “shows you that you can do whatever you want in life — as long as it's for the good of others.”