Gabriella Cooperman was 5 when she witnessed the difference that therapeutic horseback riding made for her younger sister Danielle, who has special developmental needs.
“I saw how wonderful and magical horseback riding therapy could be,” said Cooperman, now 14. “So when I heard that there were kids who needed the therapy but couldn’t afford it, I knew I wanted to help.”
With her mother’s assistance, the 5-year-old decided to set up a lemonade stand at an intersection near her home in Highland Park, Illinois to raise the $500 necessary to send a young girl to a one-week therapeutic riding camp at Equestrian Connection, the riding center and stable where Cooperman’s sister received her therapy.
But Cooperman quickly realized that just selling lemonade might not be enough to meet her goal, so she decided to include some homemade cookies, too.
Nine years later, Cookies for Charity is a yearly, weekend-long fundraiser — typically scheduled for the first weekend after school starts — that has collected more than $47,000 for the nonprofit Equestrian Connection in Lake Forest, which serves adults and children with special needs. “Every year I’ve doubled my fundraising goal and it’s become an annual tradition in the neighborhood,” Cooperman said. “People come to socialize, and even our mayor comes out as well.”
Cooperman recruits about 30 friends to help sell lemonade, water bottles and two kinds of homemade cookies: a nut-free sugar cookie and a signature Heath Bar Crunch chocolate chip cookie. At last August’s Cookies for Charity event, Cooperman said they stopped counting after selling 6,000 cookies and 1,000 glasses of lemonade.
The planning starts months in advance. Cooperman has secured 24 corporate sponsors who support the event by providing many of the essentials. Kraft Food, Arm & Hammer, Argo and Domino Sugar have donated gallons of lemonade, water bottles and the pounds of ingredients needed for baking the cookies. Local businesses have provided equipment for storing the cookies (baking starts months in advance), lunch for the volunteers, marketing material and supplies for building and running the stand.
Even the Chicago Bears have thrown their support behind the event, donating a signed football that Cooperman auctions off during the weekend.
Cooperman, a freshman at Highland Park High School outside Chicago, said she will continue to plan a Cookies for Charity event every year through the remainder of her high school years. After she graduates, she hopes to pass on the fundraiser to someone else to run.
“The biggest lessons that I have learned from Cookies for Charity is that working hard is the greatest award ever and it’s a great feeling to help others,” Cooperman said. “I hope that I am inspiring other youth to support the idea of tikkun olam [healing the world] and making another person’s life better.”