Labor Day weekend often marks the end of summer vacation, and this girl was ready to get back to work.
Emery Alford, 7, spent Monday’s holiday running a lemonade stand to raise money for refugee aid, WWBT reported. The second-grader from Goochland, Virginia, raised more than $250 during the day.
"I wanted to help them because I want them to get to Europe safely," Emery told the news outlet.
The idea for a lemonade stand came about after the 7-year-old’s mother, Michelle, explained the current refugee crisis, and that families were trying to get to safety in Europe.
"I try to instill in the girls, kind of a sense of how lucky we are that we live in such a great country where we don't have to worry about being run out of our homes,” she told WWBT.
So, Emery decided to make some fresh lemonade and sell it outside of a grocery store in Gum Spring, Virginia. In four hours, she raised over $250, all of which will go to the Migrant Offshore Aid Station.
"I feel like I'm so lucky,” Emery told WWBT, “and [refugees] have to travel from one thing to another without food or clean water, so I wanted to help them.”
According to the Guardian, MOAS helped save more than 10,000 lives during its first year of operation, and the organization has recently experienced dramatic rise in donations to aid the current crisis.
“People are saying they don’t want to be bystanders anymore,” MOAS director Martin Xuereb told the Guardian. “We are increasingly understanding that behind every statistic, every number, there is a life, a life who has a mother, a father or a sibling, a grandparent.”
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