Kids Raised $10M To Save Eagles
A 4th-grade science class watched two bald eagles on a livestream for over a year — then helped raise $10 million to save the eagles' home from development.
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Two of the most-watched animals on the internet almost lost their home this year — and the people who saved it were nine and ten years old.
It started with a science lesson. It ended with a phone call from Silicon Valley.
Jackie and Shadow are a pair of bald eagles who nest above Big Bear Lake in California, and for years, millions of people around the world have watched them live — building their nest, laying eggs, raising chicks — on a 24/7 webcam. Science teacher Sara Stinson wove that livestream into her class's life-cycles unit at John Baldwin Elementary School in Danville, California, and her fourth and fifth graders were hooked. Then came the news that threatened it all: a developer wanted to build fifty luxury homes and a marina on the last undeveloped stretch of shoreline on the lake — the exact ground where Jackie and Shadow hunt to feed their chicks. Conservationists had one path left to stop it: raise ten million dollars by the end of July to buy the land outright, or lose it for good.
Stinson's students didn't wait for the adults to handle it. They set up lemonade stands. They held bake sales. They folded paper eagles to sell and walked the streets of downtown Danville with handmade posters. They wrote letters — real, persuasive letters — to community members, celebrities, and lawmakers, asking them to help save a home they'd been watching grow for over a year. "It was very sad for us," fourth grader Evie Cook said, "because we are worried that the thing we have been watching for years can go away." Their campaign caught the attention of national news, and it kept spreading. By midsummer, more than twenty-five thousand donations had come in from around the world. Then, just days before the deadline, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, gave five and a half million dollars in a single gift — and the ten-million-dollar goal was met.
The recognition came fast. PETA honored the John Baldwin Elementary students with a Guardian of the Eagles Award and a vegan ice cream party, and its education arm, TeachKind, continues partnering with the school to keep building on what the kids started.
This is bigger than two eagles. It's proof that when adults hand kids a real problem instead of a small one, they don't just rise to it — they can move a ten-million-dollar mountain. Jackie and Shadow's chicks will grow up on that same shoreline, and so will every class Sara Stinson teaches after this one, with a lesson no textbook could have given them: that showing up, even with a lemonade stand, actually works.
Sources: goodnewsnetwork.org · cbsnews.com
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