Better Angels
Young girl dedicates her birthdays to the needy.
Elliot Koenig is 8 years old and lives in a lovely house in a town northwest of Milwaukee.
She’s fond of the animals that live in the woods beyond her backyard — deer, fox, owls, turkeys, rabbits, coyotes — though her dad, Mark, wouldn’t mind if they’d stop eating everything in his garden, particularly, for two years in a row, his beloved German heirloom tomatoes.
“It’s like the Discovery Channel out there,” he says.
Mark’s exasperation is mostly for show, and it cracks Elliot up. She knows, and she knows that her dad and her mom, Sarah, know, how abundant their lives have been.
Elliot may only be in second grade, but there is a lot she understands. Like the difference between need and want.
“You need food, pajamas, clothes to wear and insurance,” she says (her mom works in financial services).
“You don’t need toys,” she says. “I have lots of toys, and I don’t need lots more.”
That was the situation Elliot found herself in as she approached her fourth birthday. She wanted to have a birthday party, but she already had all the pajamas and insurance a kid could need.
She talked it over with her mom and dad and decided to ask her party guests to bring something for a charity she had selected.
“Me and my family, we really love to give back to the community,” she says.
That first year, “Elliot’s Giveback Party” as it would come to be called, benefited lost and strayed animals. She unwrapped chew toys, doggy treats and cans of food, which she then boxed up and presented to the county humane society.
Elliot’s birthday is in August, and this year’s giveback was to Kids Matter Inc., a Milwaukee-based agency that helps abused and neglected children who have been placed in foster care.
“Can you imagine if you had to leave your mom and dad and live in a stranger’s house?” Elliot asks. Elliot wraps her arms around herself and shivers. Elliot thought of what it might be like that first night in someone else’s home and asked her party guests to bring pajamas, stuffed animals or night lights.
Pajamas and fuzzy toys, for obvious reasons. Night lights, she says, because “foster care is a dark place. Dark memories. Forget the dark times and the darkness. I know a lot of kids are afraid of the dark. I am.”
Elliot has a night light of her own and she really likes it. It projects stars and planets on her bedroom wall.
“It’s very nice,” she says.
Elliot has a blue poster board on which she has recorded this year’s offerings: 23 sets of pajamas,19 stuffed animals, 23 night lights and a few other things.
She and her mom brought the haul over to Kids Matter, got a tour of the place and met some of the staff.
One of the women on the staff had grown up in foster care. She told Elliot that her foster parents had been very kind to her.
“Now she’s giving back,” Elliot says.