Woman Collects Supplies, Honors Grandmother For 17 Years

This Independence Day, NBC 4 is honoring Everyday Heroes -- including a woman who has selflessly given to others around Southern Ohio.

Emily Douglas founded Grandma's Gifts -- an organization that has donated more than $12 million worth of goods and services to people of all ages in Appalachia.

She was nominated as an Everyday Hero not just for what she gives, but also how she interacts with others.

"I think we live in a me society, so when you see someone who gives to others like she does, it stands out," said Michael McCollum, who nominated Douglas.

It's 9:15 p.m. on a Friday and Douglas, a Battelle consultant, has been working in Houston all week. But it's hardly time to kick back.

"I love this and it doesn't feel like work," she said.

At a Morningstar storage facility, Douglas, her mother, Teri, her father, Jerry, and a new volunteer, Michael, get to work.

The facility is ground zero for Grandma's Gifts. Douglas started the organization in 1993 at age 11 in memory of her grandmother, Norma Ackison, after she lost her battle with breast cancer.

Douglas said her grandmother was one of 11 children and lost her father when she was 4 months old. She grew up during the depression years largely because of the kindness of neighbors. It was a kindness Ackison repaid over and over.

"She would load us kids into the car and go buy canned goods and then drive into the hills to take canned food to the veterans and buy extra clothes. I wondered where they went, because I was 6 and thought they were for me, but they weren't," Douglas said. "I missed her so much, so I decided to do this in her memory."

The first year, Douglas wrote to friends of her parents who were still living in Ironton and received $300 in checks. She bought Christmas clothes and gifts for three poor children living in Lawrence County.

A few years later, at 14 years old, Douglas' parents drove her along a dirt road to a house with no phone to deliver a Christmas wish to a boy. The wish was a new coat. The boy's mother cried and, Douglas said, she was hooked.

Each year, the word spread and Douglas held drives for canned food, school supplies, clothes and personal hygiene products -- responding to the passion of a young girl and her friends.

Douglas has harnessed the power of the Internet and Social Media, reaching out through her Web site, Facebook, MySpace and podcasts. The response receives has been varied and dramatic.

Libraries and stores like Half-Priced Books have helped Douglas stock the shelves of school and public libraries in poor counties with 650,000 books.

$3 million in goods and services from eyeglasses to playground equipment have been sent to shelters, churches and schools. 

The organization has been able to send underprivileged children on field trips to zoos and COSI.

Douglas has driven the Morningstar storage box truck to Scioto, Lawrence, Vinton, Adams and Jackson counties, and last Thanksgiving, Grandma's Gifts partnered with Americans helping Americans for a timely expression of caring.

"We handed out 1,521 turkeys in a parking lot of Emerson Network Power," she said. "We bought toothbrushes and toothpaste and asked adults if they wanted them. One said, 'I haven't had one in years.'"

From her bedroom and her parents' garage, a handful of young volunteers, Douglas has honored her grandmother's memory by raising and distributing $12.5 million of goods and services to an estimated 2.4 million people of Appalachia in five states.

Douglas is an Everyday Hero to people of all ages, as well as a role model to a new generation of public servants.

"Kids tell me all the time, 'I am just a kid. What can I do?' I tell them it's because you are a kid that people will get behind you. It happened to me and it just exploded," Douglas said.

NBC 4 is making a $500 donation to Grandma's Gifts.