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When Joshua Williams was 5, he caught sight of starving children in one of those sponsor-a-child TV ads. His mother, Claudia McLean, noticed tears in his eyes as he turned to her and sputtered, "Mom, look at those kids!"
When he demanded that his mother adopt the children he had seen on TV, she told him they could sponsor one child. But he wasn't satisfied with such a small effort. He knew that fixing such extreme suffering required more than a few dollars.
"I realized he'd never seen anything like that before," Ms. McLean reflected, remembering how the distressing images sparked big ideas in her little boy. "He wanted to make a place for people to come where they can have food all the time.”
Three years later, he is one of the younge
st foundation presidents in the world, leading Joshua's Heart Foundation, the Miami Beach NGO he dreamed up and named himself, which has so far distributed 250,000 pounds of food to needy people in South Florida communities.
With a cheerful smile and a mop of curls, he hands out cans and boxes of cereal to those who come to the tent-and-table food banks he and his family and a cadre of volunteers create every month in front of area churches.
"I want to give food to them so they won’t be hungry and they won't starve," the young social entrepreneur explained.
When Joshua Williams was 5, he caught sight of starving children in one of those sponsor-a-child TV ads. His mother, Claudia McLean, noticed tears in his eyes as he turned to her and sputtered, "Mom, look at those kids!"
When he demanded that his mother adopt the children he had seen on TV, she told him they could sponsor one child. But he wasn't satisfied with such a small effort. He knew that fixing such extreme suffering required more than a few dollars.
"I realized he'd never seen anything like that before," Ms. McLean reflected, remembering how the distressing images sparked big ideas in her little boy. "He wanted to make a place for people to come where they can have food all the time.”
Three years later, he is one of the younge
With a cheerful smile and a mop of curls, he hands out cans and boxes of cereal to those who come to the tent-and-table food banks he and his family and a cadre of volunteers create every month in front of area churches.
"I want to give food to them so they won’t be hungry and they won't starve," the young social entrepreneur explained.
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