Hollygrove Children’s Home, an orphanage in California home to 60 children back in 1998, needed a library.
It wouldn’t be hard, 8-year-old Brandon Keefe thought, to gather the books he and his friends owned and had already read, which were sitting undisturbed on bookshelves, and donate them to the children in need.
But it was hard for Zeke Fleissner-Kates, a fourth-grader at the Bloomington Project School, to fully understand that some children could live in a such a different world than his own — a world without books.
“This school has tons of books. My house has tons of books,” Zeke said. “I was surprised somebody needed books.”
Keefe is the founder of BookEnds, a nonprofit organization that holds book drives to send new reading materials to students at schools, after-school organizations and other centers in Southern California that need them. His work has helped deliver more than 2 million books to hundreds of thousands of children.
BookEnds can’t send books to every child who has nothing to read. But Keefe, Zeke learned, is still a “starfish thrower.”
The students in Cindy Newland’s mixed third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classroom were introduced to the concept of human rights by way of the short tale of the starfish thrower. After a storm, a beach was covered with starfish that had washed ashore. A child began to throw them back into the ocean, one by one. When someone told the child that the effort could never make a difference because the child couldn’t throw back all the starfish, the child threw yet another and replied, “I made a difference to that one.”
“It’s impossible to fix all the problems in the world,” Zeke said. “But at least you help fix one.”