Sunday, December 17, 2000

Abilene Samaritan profiled in new book
By Bill Whitaker
Shelf Life

Abilene’s very own Alisia Orosco is one of the nation’s top 20 youth volunteers profiled in social psychologist Susan K. Perry’s newly released Catch the Spirit (Franklin Watts, 192 pages, $14.95), which tells how and why they got involved in community service projects.

In case you’ve forgotten, Alisia was the thoughtful, observant 9-year-old Abilene lass who with her family made regular visits to the hospital to see her ailing baby brother and comfort him with his Pooh bear and other stuffed animals.

Eventually, she noticed other ailing children received neither visits nor stuffed animals.

The rest is history — or so it would seem.

With allowance money and help from others, Alisia founded Every Child Needs a Hug, distributing hundreds of stuffed animals to hospitalized children in Texas. Even after her own brother died and her mother became ill, Alisia continued the project — “to honor them,” she explained.

Perry’s new book concentrates on 20 such students who have received Prudential Spirit of Community Awards over the past five years. In the book, each of the youths tells his or her own story about recognizing a community need and taking steps to address it.

In her chapter, Alisia writes of using her allowance money to buy stuffed animals for sick and abused children. In between visiting her ailing brother at the hospital, she and another brother pooled their resources to buy 15 stuffed animals and bring them to pediatric patients.

Even after her baby brother’s death, Alisia continued her efforts, recruiting helpers, soliciting donations and purchasing 250 stuffed animals that second year.

Perry’s book also offers extensive information on how young people can get started in volunteering — a hallmark of community life in Abilene, incidentally. In addition, Capture the Spirit offers 200 ideas for service projects and lists informational resources for youth volunteers.

The Prudential Spirit of Community Awards, created in 1995 by Prudential in partnership with the National Association of Secondary School Principals, is the nation’s largest youth recognition program based exclusively on community service and volunteerism.

“Most pre-teens and teens are very idealistic and they long to have an impact on the world around them,” Perry says. “I wrote this book to show them that real teens just like them have found ways to change their communities for the better.”

For more information about this book, consult the Web sites www.prudential.com or www.grolier.com. A hardcover version of the book runs for $33.

Incidentally, one of the more lamentable facts I drew from this book is that Alisia now lives in San Antonio. Definitely, it’s our loss.

But while Every Child Needs a Hug is no more, Ellen Daulton, Meek Children’s Hospital nurse manager, tells me numerous church groups, university clubs and volunteers from Abilene and beyond continue to readily donate stuffed animals to hospitalized youngsters in Abilene.

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.