Jayera Griffin knows a thing or two about community service. It is, after all, while she was tutoring younger kids at her school when she realized that something just wasn’t quite right.
“I would see that their clothes weren’t as clean as they could be,” the eighth-grader at Washington Junior High in Riverdale, Ill., told WGN-TV. “So I thought they would focus more on what people would think about them and that it would lower their self-esteem and they wouldn’t focus on their education.”
And so Jayera decided to start raising money in order to hold a “Free Wash Day” at the Mama’s laundromat so everybody got to wash their clothes for free. Her wash day happened this past Tuesday after she raised $1,000.
Her father, Michael Griffin, said that’s just the way Jayera was raised.
“We raised her to be like this, where she knows to give and help out other people. A lot of people don’t have what we have and don’t have the luck we have. I’m very proud of her,” Griffin told the news station.
And Riverdale residents are certainly thankful for the gesture.
“I’m glad she is seeing something that maybe we adults don’t see [at] times. Maybe our kids’ clothes should be a little bit cleaner. I really appreciated her for raising the money,” Keochia Alexander, a mother of two, said.
Jayera hopes to continue raising money so that she can do a similar wash day when she goes back to school in August.