For the first six years of her life, Michaela Mycroft had lived a disadvantaged life, born with a condition that limits her movements of her limbs. Chaeli (as her friends and family calls her), at the age of seven, started a campaign to raise money with her friends and family so she could buy a motorized wheelchair. Knowing how difficult it is to be disabled, and driven by the hope of helping others achieve equality, Chaeli expanded her campaign to help raise money to buy wheelchairs and other prosthetics for other disabled children, and to give peer support to each other. Michaela Mycroft is a seventeen year old girl, who had won the International Children’s Peace prize in 2011, for her successful attempts at achieving equality and fighting for hope for disabled children.
Ever since her birth, Chaeli has been struggling with fitting in, due to her disabilities with her limbs. She strived to be equal to others, to overcome her own difficulties. With the help of her family and friends, she achieved so, buying a motorized wheelchair to help her get around with ease. “I think we need to make a conscious decision to see the light in every person we meet. I think we need to be more positive about each other. If we see the light in each other, I believe we would live in a much brighter world,” (2) said Chaeli during one of her interviews. Instead of feeling satisfied, and continuing her life, Chaeli wanted more. She wanted to help other children with disabilities to overcome the same obstacles she did, and for everybody to see that everybody could be equal, and so started the Chaeli Campaign. The Chaeli Campaign raises money to buy prosthetics and wheelchairs for children who need them, and more importantly, it was like a beacon of hope, a place where these people, however maimed or handicapped can band together, providing moral support to each other.
Along with moral support and access to ways to become equal, Chaeli has also been striving for hope. She hoped that she would be able to help others, and in turn, have them also hope for each other, to hope for what they deserve. “Hope is what keeps us going,” Chaeli said in her speech. “It’s what keeps us striving for the lives we deserve. I have hope for myself, but I also have hope for all other children with disabilities. I hope that my actions as an ability activist will leave the world more accepting and more” (2). She hopes to inspire a way of thinking, like the one she had gone through herself, she doesn’t see her handicap as a disadvantage, but as a doorway to possibilities- and ultimately as something she fights for.
So what has Chaeli been doing? Where others feel sorry for her, she sees a fire that fuels her revolution. She not only accomplished and overcame challenges of her own, and also started an organization to help others do the same thing. Chaeli had been fighting, and she fights for equality, and she fights to inspire others into overcoming their challenges, and most importantly, she fights to inspire hope in other people. Chaeli fought, to help others going through that miserable first six years of her life.
sources used:
1 http://childrenspeaceprize.org/childrens-peace-price/2011-chaeli-mycroft/
2 http://www.kidsrights.org/InternationalChildrensPeacePrize/Winners.aspx
3 http://childrenspeaceprize.org/
