Volunteers offer a light in the night

It’s Thursday evening and about 20 volunteers have gathered at the Riggs CAT headquarters in Little Rock to shed a little light.

For the next couple of hours they will pack 1,500 Frozen-themed night lights and handmade cards into boxes, which will be sent to foster children across Arkansas and the U.S.

They are here because of Amelia Lisowe, a 9-yearold who attends Hurricane Creek Elementary School in Bryant.

In 2018, Amelia, along with her mom, Lauren, started Lisowe’s Lights, which provides night lights to foster children.

Through Lauren’s work as a volunteer board member for Court Appointed Special Advocates in Saline County, Amelia heard stories about foster children.

“I thought a night light might comfort them if they are scared of the dark in their new home,” she says.

With help from her school counselor and through fundraisers and donations, she eventually collected about 550 lights.

“We would get the donations, and then we would usually go to the dollar store and we would pick out some night lights we thought they may like,” Amelia says. “And sometimes, people would just give us night lights.”

Several months later, Amelia and Lisowe’s Lights were the subject of a story on Little Rock CBS affiliate THV11, which led to a CBS This Morning feature and even more donations.

“For a long time, we would get night lights and box them up as they came in,” Lauren says. “She and I, and maybe a friend, would sit on the floor and box up one or two boxes at a time.”

But they started getting much larger donations — imagine pallets filled with boxes of night lights — and needed help.

“We added a second area of focus to Lisowe’s Lights to recruit families to come volunteer together,” Lauren says. “It allows younger kids to see that volunteering can be fun.”

The group here this night, which includes Amelia’s family and friends, is helping to pack and ship the 1,500 night lights donated by Jasco Products, an Oklahoma City-based consumer electronics company.

Since 2018, Amelia has collected 4,300 night lights, and they’ve been sent to all 50 states.

“It makes me feel really good to do this,” she says. “We don’t really have plans for the future, but my mom was telling me that we need to start thinking about it because this has gotten big.”

For more information, visit lisoweslights.com