Girl Breaks Her Own Piggy Bank To Start Milk Fund For Classmate

Thanks to the kindness of one little girl, a class of Michigan kindergartners won’t have to worry about whether or not they have enough money to buy some milk at lunch.

Sunshine Oelfke, a 5-year-old girl from Ishpeming, Michigan, decided to break open her piggy bank when she realized that a friend in her kindergarten class at Birchview Elementary School didn’t have money to buy milk. According to WXYZ, Sunshine’s sweetness brought her grandmother to tears.

“I was sitting my chair just doing some work … and Sunshine brought out her piggy banks and dumped them on the floor next to me. She just started counting,” Jackie Oelfke said. “She counted her money, then put it in baggies, then put it in her backpack. She said she was taking it to school for her friend … because her friend’s mom doesn’t have milk money.”

Oelfke said she didn’t want to discourage Sunshine’s spirit, so the pair met with her teacher and agreed she could use $30 of her own money to help buy the other girl’s milk, which costs 45 cents per carton, according to CBS News. It turned out there were some other kids in the class who couldn’t afford milk either, and Sunshine wanted to help them all.

“[Sunshine] said, ‘It’s not right that [I] have milk money and she doesn’t’,” Oelfke said in her Facebook video. “I can’t give everybody milk money but what do I do for Sunshine? Because I can’t tell Sunshine she can’t help somebody.”

After further questioning from Sunshine about why they couldn’t provide milk for the entire class, Oelfke said she planned on donating her commissions from her job selling Younique cosmetics that month to help the entire class get milk. But wanting to help even more, Oelfke then came up with the idea to start a GoFundMe page on October 6, with the initial goal of raising $700 to cover the cost of milk for the entire class for a semester. The page ended up raising more than $7,000, with donations from at least 300 people as of October 18.

“At this point, Sunshine has earned enough money for the entire class to have milk (if they choose) for second semester,” Oelfke wrote in an update on the GoFundMe page Monday. She also said her granddaughter’s kindness made her realize some hard truths. “I feel really naive because you forget that this is an issue. We’re doing OK and Sunshine always has milk money,” Oelfke said in her Facebook video before the GoFundMe page was started. “But for her, at the age of 5, to realize that there are other kids that don’t get something as simple as milk for snack … She’s so genuine.”

Sunshine was originally saving her money to buy a snowmobile, but she decided that helping others was more important. This one little girl has more compassion in her little heart than ten adults.

Please go here to donate to the milk fund.