5-Year-Old Girl Empties Piggy Bank to Pay for Her Classmates' Milk

"She doesn't understand the impact she's made," her grandmother Jackie Oelfke said

Photo: GoFundMe

When 5-year-old Sunshine Oelfke discovered that her classmate couldn’t afford milk at school, she didn’t think twice about emptying her entire piggy bank to try and help.

As she sat on her living room floor in Ishpeming, Michigan, her grandmother, Jackie Oelfke, watched her line up stacks of nickels, pennies, dimes and crinkled bills that she then put into her backpack.

“That piqued my curiosity,” Jackie told CBS News. “Nobody messes with the piggy bank.”

When she asked her what she was doing, Sunshine told her she was taking it to school.

“I’m going to take it for milk money. I’m taking it for my friend Layla,” she explained. “She doesn’t get milk — her mom doesn’t have milk money and I do.”

Together, they went to Birchview Elementary School to meet with the principal and gave her the $30 she had saved.

GoFundMe

According to the news outlet, there are 20 kids in Sunshine’s class and about half can’t afford the milk, which costs $0.45 a carton, adding up to $180 a month for those students combined.

After she dropped her off at school, Jackie posted a video on Facebook about her granddaughter’s selfless act, which has since been viewed over 5,000 times.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fjkesue%2Fvideos%2F10210352864673541%2F&show_text=0&width=267

People then offered to help the other students who couldn’t afford milk during snack time. It inspired Jackie to take it a step further and try to raise $700 to cover the cost of milk for the entire semester.

Within one week, according to CBS, she raised over $1,000 through a GoFundMe page she set up, which will afford every student in Sunshine’s class the chance to have free milk all year long.

“She doesn’t understand the impact she’s made,” Jackie said. “But now she knows she can do whatever she puts her mind to.”