Injured and endangered animals have a friend in Stephanie Cohen. When she was eight years old, Stephanie read an article in a local paper about an injured manatee in Florida. Since kindergarten, she had been fascinated by manatees and read as much as she could about them. Now she felt that she had to do something to help. Crafting hand-made manatee pins, she sold them to friends and relatives to raise awareness about the plight of the manatees, distributing all of the proceeds to the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute to help care for injured marine animals.

Her experience raising money for marine animals led Stephanie to become more involved in advocating for animal welfare, even though she was just a kid. In fact, what she had learned from her own efforts to help an injured manatee was that kids can actually make a difference. As other children learned about the work she was doing, they began to ask her how they could also contribute, and Stephanie realized there was an opportunity to take this momentum and form a kid-centered nonprofit organization to promote animal rights.

The result was Kids Making A Difference, a 501(c)3 organization especially for kids interested in animal welfare and protecting the environment. Kids Making A Difference volunteers have a positive impact in their communities by participating in city street cleanup programs, fostering and collecting needed items for homeless pets, and fundraising for the preservation of endangered wildlife. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, volunteers from the organization came to the rescue of animal shelters affected by the disaster.

"It has been five years now and we are still going strong," says Stephanie, president of an organization that now has members across the United States. Currently in tenth grade, she has introduced the organization into her high school where it has experienced its biggest growth yet. Over the past school year, Kids Making A Difference volunteers helped several animal shelters in need, adopted a manatee for a third grade class, and have been active in a variety of recycling projects.

To learn more about Stephanie Cohen and her cause, and how you can make a difference, please visit: www.kmad.org.

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