Published: August 25, 2007 06:00 am      

Youngster donates birthday to raise funds

Girl’s carnival benefits Pregnancy Care Center

Under normal circumstances, 11-year-old Elise Hester would have been blowing out birthday candles Thursday, surrounded by a small group of friends and stacks of gifts.

Instead, she was running around her backyard as the host of a fundraiser carnival for the Pregnancy Care Center she held on Friday.

Rather than accept presents, Hester used her birthday money to get a moonwalk, a slip and slide and food, which the attendants of the event traded diapers, wipes or monetary donations for the center to enjoy.

“I love babies. They’re so cute and I want them all to have a good start,” she said. “That’s why I’m doing this.”

Hester organized a similar carnival for her 10th birthday, which her mother, Kristen Hester, said approximately 80 people attended.

“The party last year was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Kristen Hester said. “This year, she decided she wanted to make it bigger and better, so she’s been passing out invitations at school and church, and I’ve been e-mailing people we know.

“I have no idea how many people are going to show up at this thing.”

Elise Hester said her mother told her she needed to wait until the end of the school year to start planning, so she started organizing the party at the very beginning of the summer.

“I like to plan stuff,” she said. “I get that from my mom and my grandma. I thought it would be fun to plan a fundraiser carnival. It’s been stressful and has gotten overwhelming, but it has been really fun.”

Hester said she didn’t know why she decided to hold another fundraiser for the center, but she said she likes the Pregnancy Care Center because her mom used to work on the center’s board.

“I’m very proud of her,” Kristen Hester said. “I wanted her to learn to budget, but I also wanted her to have a good carnival, so I kept sneaking in more stuff without telling her.”

Elise Hester said she planned the party was planned using approximately $200 and some “really cool computer programs.”

“I had to buy stuff from Wal-Mart and Michaels and places like that, design everything, send letters to people asking them to help and make flyers on the computer,” she said. “We also sent big invitations to people who offered to help.”

After the carnival, Hester said she and the fifth- and sixth- grade girls who assisted at the event were going to have a small sleepover.

“The carnival was a little big so I won’t have a birthday cake, but I’ll get to play games and go to bed who knows when,” she said. “The girls that helped out were really working hard just because they wanted to, and I wanted to reward them.”

After all of the planning and work that went into the fundraiser, Elise Hester said she was really excited about how everything turned out.

“This is really cool,” she said. “I don’t know exactly why I did it, but I’m really pumped about it.”