Team Mari Support

Hi everyone. My name is Mari Copeny and I'm 17 years old. You may know me as Little Miss Flint, although I'm not so little anymore. While most people know me for my work around the Flint water crisis and addressing the toxic water in America, a great deal of my service work is done right here in my own community for the kids of Flint, Michigan.

Every single year we put on several events including an Easter egg hunt and basket giveaway, a back-to-school giveaway with backpacks, supplies, personal care items, shoes, and more, a Halloween event, and a huge Christmas event where we give out thousands of toys, bikes, coats, and make it an entire experience for the kids.

Impact over the years:

- 21,000 fully stuffed backpacks

- Over $800k in toys given away

- Over 20k in books distributed

- 2,000 coats given away

- Over 15,000 snack bags distributed

- Over 1,000 lbs of candy given away for Halloween

- Hundreds of uniforms

- Hundreds of personal hygiene kits

- Over 1,500 Easter baskets

- 500 bikes

Doing events of this size takes months of prep, and we work on these events all year long. That means we begin shopping for the next event the day after the previous event. That is how we are able to sustain our events by working year-round, shopping deals, and storing things in our storage.

On January 9th of this year, we got a call from our property manager that our Team Mari storage unit (along with our personal storage unit) was broken into. Not only did they steal thousands of dollars worth of toys, school supplies, coats, shoes, and other items, they also broke and destroyed almost everything else including our tent, tables, our Easter bunny costume, eggs, our brand new bubble house, balloon supplies, and more. We have to almost completely start over for every single event. We have been working on our supply of items for close to 10 years now. We have never had any issues at this property in the 8 years we have been at this facility, and we are still not sure if we were targeted or if this was random. But we lost so much. Insurance will only cover $5,000 and is giving us the biggest runaround, and we still have no idea when and if we will even get that from the insurance company.