Cassy Rivera, Brooklyn Woman, Overcomes Eye Disease, Donates Disability Checks To Charity

Brooklyn Woman's Charitable Spirit: MyFoxNY.com

After overcoming a rare eye disease, Cassy Rivera is seeing things more clearly.

Grateful to have had her eyesight restored, Rivera, a Brooklyn mother of two, now donates anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of her disability checks to charity, MyFoxNY.com reports.

"How can I just sit here, or anywhere I'm at and not feed no one who don't have food," Rivera asked the news source, "or give the person who don't have no rent, rent?"

On the other side of the country, Navy veteran Shane D'Onofrio had a similar benevolent idea.

He and his wife started a What Would U Give, an organization that fights veteran homelessness in New Mexico and each month, D'Onofrio reinvests his disability check -- $1,700 -- to help run the organization, KOAT.com reports.

"The idea was, why don't we start something here locally to help our veterans, brothers and sisters, that are on the street?" D'Onofrio told the news source. "And find them a place to live."

But Rivera's continued health complications threaten to get in the way of her giving mission. She has diabetes and multiple sclerosis and turns to her daughters and donations to help make ends meet.

"I'm going to continue to make people happy," Rivera told MyFoxNY.com, "and I'm going to continue to make people smile and laugh till the day I can't breathe no more."