How long is five years? 43,829 hours, 1,826.21 days, 260.997 weeks and 60 months. If you are 10 years old, it’s half your life. If you are 20, a quarter. If you have lost someone you love, a lifetime.
What can you do in five years? The five-year plan, change your life, change the world around you or make a difference. Or you can just watch the time pass by and wonder what if?
We chose different.
As of April 5, it has been five years since Emily disappeared from our lives. She was 13 — just starting on her teenage years. She would be 18 now, starting on her adult life, in college, figuring out her life, who she would like to become. Five years — a lifetime. How can we change in five years? Are we the same person we were five years ago, no matter what our age? I think not.
In the past five years, we have started a nonprofit foundation. In three years, we have helped over 200 middle school children. In five years, we have promoted more than 14,000 good deeds, and counting.
For five years, I have walked around with a hole in my heart, but a smile on my face. In five years, Emily lives in the lives of the children we have helped to succeed through her foundation. Children who are smart. Children who only needed a helping hand. Children who were struggling in the main stream of middle school, who learned differently, were having emotional problems, didn’t have the proper attention of their teachers or were embarrassed to ask for help. Without the ability to get help, these children would fail and be a burden to us all.
A child fails. At times, it may be the child’s fault, but a child is not an adult and the responsibility of children falls on adults. A child who loses faith in themselves acts out and becomes a burden and a responsibility to us all.
These smart, bright children who are struggling because they learn different just need a helping hand to make the change to feeling good about themselves because, ultimately, success is about believing in oneself.
The Emily Shane Foundation helps these children; presently, we are in nine schools in L.A. and Ventura County. We train a mentor — a coach, a person who won’t judge them, someone who is close to their age, a university student — and pair them together. The university student helps the middle school child succeed, teaching them to study, showing them solutions to problems or just listening.
The middle school child must in turn help someone else out through our “Pass It Forward” program; each mentor session must be paid for with a good deed. The cost has a big impact because even though no money is exchanged, the child learns to give back and ingrains this into their psyche and they are forever changed. Sixty-five good deeds in one year is the cost of the program to the child, that’s twice a week throughout the school year.
Where will they be in five years? What about the university student mentor, when was the last time a 20-something hung out with a 12-year-old that wasn’t related? The impact goes both ways. The mentors are amazing. Many give back because someone cared in their lives. People often criticize young adults in college for not caring or for being self-absorbed; we have found this to be far from the truth. The new generation cares and is willing to step up and we are proud to have them as the frontline for change in our foundation.
For me, it was very important that in five years, Emily wasn’t that poor little girl murdered on PCH, what was her name again? That would have been a waste and disgrace to the life she lived. She inspires me every day to be better and to care and I miss her smile, her laughter and her easygoing attitude, just letting things slide away like rain.
The Emily Shane Foundation is at a crossroads. We can either expand or stay the same. The need is there and we can no longer operate the way we have these last three years. It’s too much work for just Ellen and our volunteers. We need to build our infrastructure and expand. For this, we need help from others; we need to build the financial strength to grow. If not, then we will stay a small foundation that helps a finite group of children, which would be a pity because there is nothing presently in the system for middle school children, they seem to be forgotten. There are a lot of programs for grade school and high school. A child changed today in middle school is an adult tomorrow who will care.
Emily, on this the fifth year of us missing her smile, her laughter and her ability at such a young age to be there for others, is what we are all about and what she would be doing herself if she could. She cared and so do we.
I am pleased to say she is not that poor girl that was murdered on PCH but rather a beacon of light that is shining bright to show the way to success to her peers.