Hampstead Garden Suburb schoolgirl raises hundreds for cancer charity with bracelet business
Emma Cohen has been making rainbow bracelets and selling them in aid of Cancer UK. Picture: Nigel Sutton. - Credit: Nigel Sutton
A nine-year-old has made and sold more than 100 bracelets outside her home in aid of a cancer research charity.
Emma Cohen-Edmonds, a Year 5 pupil at Garden Suburb Junior School, in Childs Way, Hampstead Garden Suburb, began making rainbow loom bracelets for fun during her school Easter holidays.
After realising she had a knack for crafting the bracelets, made from multi-coloured rubber bands, Emma told her mum Orly Cohen, 52, she wanted to sell them.
Ms Cohen explained: “I said, ‘What do you need the money for?’ She didn’t let me finish and said: ‘I want to sell the bracelets and give all the money to Cancer Research.’
“I was gobsmacked. What girl of nine years of age would think of that?”
Emma, who lives with her parents in the Suburb, sells the bracelets for £2 each, from a stall set up in Lyttelton Playing Fields, off Lyttelton Road.
She has also sold some of the bracelets in Regent’s Park and has now raised more than £200 for Cancer Research UK.
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Ms Cohen said her daughter was inspired to start her charity work because of her grandfathers, who died before she was born.
“Both her grandfathers died of cancer and then she adopted another grandfather who also died of cancer, so she’s very aware of what cancer does to people,” said Ms Cohen.
“She said to me, ‘When are they going to find the cure for this monster?’
“I’m over the moon with her. I think it’s beyond belief that a child, at the age of nine, came up with the idea.
“I never believed that we were going to get to the amount we have, and it’s not finishing.”
Emma, who plans to continue raising more with regular bracelet sales, said: “I was thinking, ‘Maybe I should sell these bracelets since I can make them.’
“I thought not only of my grandfathers, but other people who are suffering from cancer now, or earlier, or maybe in the future.”
