By Paige Nash
You may have seen a cute little lemonade stand set up at Turner’s Pond on Saturday with an even cuter pair of workers.
St. Jude patient and local hero Cole Benson with the help of his brother, Cooper, and under the supervision of their mother, Ashleigh, beat the heat to take up the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s monthly challenge.
Each month St. Jude encourages families and community supporters to participate in different monthly challenges to help raise money that will be donated to the hospital. This money will help to ensure that the families who find themselves at the doors of St. Jude will not have to spend a dime on travel, treatments, housing, food or other expenses that may come up during their stay.
As a current patient at St. Jude, this is personal for Cole and his family.
He said, “It helps St. Jude to keep helping kids like me get better.”
Cole’s grandfather Morris Busby built the stand that he and his brother sold lemonade and sno cones out of from 8 – 11 a.m. Saturday morning.
“A lot of people came by and gave a lot of money and thank you to all those people,” said Benson.
In just three hours, the duo sold close to $800 dollars that they will donate to the annual Minden St. Jude Auction in February.
The Lemonade Challenge is the St. Jude July challenge. Other challenges for the month include 100 crunches a day, swimming 15 miles, grilling, 31 acts of kindness, biking for 50 miles or playing 45 games of pickleball. All of these can be accomplished while raising money that can be donated to help the kids of St. Jude and their families.
July has just begun which means you have almost all month to get moving and get to donating.
