Katherine's 'Brave' choice: Donating her birthday!

By Laurie Lopez, Katherine’s mum. 
When planning our daughter Katherine’s birthday party this year, I noticed she wanted to invite more children to her party than what we usually do each year. As I thought about it, I realized what a waste it was to receive all those gifts from kids and their parents, for a child that already seems to have so much. It seemed like we should stop looking at what we can get, and start looking out at the good we can do, recognizing how lucky we are.
I remembered stumbling along the ECHOage birthday idea through a WWF-Canada advertisement earlier this year and thought it would be the perfect solution. We have always tried to give what we could to charity, especially WWF which is our favourite. After telling Katherine about what I had learned about the ECHOAge parties, she was instantly on board and excited.

Animals and wildlife, along with conserving the habitat they live in, has always been an area of concern for our family. Katherine loves animals, and we try to educate her on them and the issues many of them face these days. We have tried to make a habit of purchasing the wildlife adoptions for Christmases and birthdays, and just recently started donating monthly. We didn’t need to think very long about the charity we were going to choose. WWF-Canada seemed like the natural choice.
For her gift, Katherine chose a trip to the Disney store which is always an exciting thing for us to do when we have the chance or excuse to go. The whole family loves Disney and we make a great day of it, going out for lunch and spending alot of time looking at everything in the store. It was an easy choice for her to make, as she gets to go and pick out whatever she would like with her birthday contributions.
The party went great! The kids had a wonderful time, and everyone thought the party was a great idea. We got Katherine a WWF wildlife adoption (a river otter) as a gift to open at the party and it didn’t leave her hands the rest of the night.

The party was a terrific success and we will definitely be doing another one next year!