Blog
The power of ANYone
By Carol / October 18, 2012 /
Writing earlier this week about The Power of We for Blog Action Day has caused me to think about The Power of One. As I sat down to write, up popped the story of Talia Leman and her new book.
Have you heard about Talia Leman? Talia is a 17-year-old Iowa girl who has set out to change the world. Her philanthropic efforts started when she was 10. The Hurricane Katrina tragedy that left almost a million people homeless struck her heart and rather than collect candy that Halloween, she collected money. The “Today Show” picked up the story and children across the country joined her cause.
The $312 that Talia collected on her Halloween rounds that year was compounded by donations from local companies like Hy-Vee to increase her total contribution to hurricane relief to $250,000. The total collected by kids that year for hurricane victims was report to be an amazing $10 million.
Since then, Talia has formed a non-profit called RandomKid based on her philosophy that any random kid can make a difference. And now she’s written a book – A Random Book About the Power of ANYone – published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster and released earlier this month.
If you dig very far into Talia’s story, you’ll see Talia’s had a whole lot of encouragement and assistance from a whole lot of people, so her story demonstrates the Power of We. But she also demonstrates the Power of One person as well as anyone I’ve read about lately.
One person has an idea. One person has the passion and the perseverance to push forward through adversity. One person figures out how to rally others.
Do you have a good story of the Power of One person? I’d love to hear it.
Would love to know your thoughts on the book. Recommend? Saw it on the Today Show. Heard it has book bloopers and outtakes in the back of the book.
I haven’t read it yet, Andrea. My hope is to pick it up sometime soon here in Des Moines. And then do a review to follow up this post. It seems like a good holiday gift for my nieces and nephew. Thanks for commenting.
Hi,
Yes, I do have a good story to share about the power of one person and that is myself, becuase I have created characters who are both strange and different to the literary society and I know that it will take some perserverance and promoting my work that I believe in. I have created characters that are dark and fiction as well as exciting to read about both in the children’s book market and the teen/adult book market. My characters are real and they live like real humans, but there is a dark secret to both they are spiders! That’s right my characters are a bunch of spiders, the children’s character are spider centaurs and they are lovable and exciting characters for children that teach about acceptance, faith and reaching your goals. The other characters for teen/adults are more darker type of characters and they are the hunger for ruling type of characters, but there’s one thing more about the older adults characters they bare deadly spider marks that helps to identify them. Now, I have been creating these different creatures, well, I will say since I was a eleven year old, and it took me nearly fifty years to create them in the way that they are now and I am proud of them and I want to keep on keeping on until at last, my characters have been leashed onto the world.
Thanks for sharing your story, Andrea! We authors definitely have to believe in our own stories. That’s where it starts. And what a pleasure to see our characters and stories finally make it into the world to live.
Great article, especially in these very hard economic times, solutions like these from the heart offer hope and answers. Thank you for this one.
You’re welcome, Paulette. Thanks for commenting. It is inspiring to see someone – particularly someone so young – see a challenge and set out to meet it. Gives all of us hope for the future.