Corey’s Feel Good Stories – Wed. 12/6: Socks 4 Seniors / 6th Grade School Suspension Becomes Life-Changing

1.  A 17-year-old in Stockton, California named Elle Gianelli is doing her Socks4Seniors campaign again for the holidays.  She sends “silly socks” and kind notes to nursing homes around the country just to make people smile.

She started doing it in 7th grade.  In the past four years, she’s sent nearly 5,000 pairs of socks to 92 nursing homes across 48 states.  She raises money for it on GoFundMe if you want to help her out.

2.  School principal Jason Smith met Raven when she was 12 years old in 2015, sitting outside his office after being suspended from the sixth grade.

“She was just this sweet looking, little innocent child sitting there, kind of defeated. I asked her, ‘What’s going on?’ and she said that she had thrown a cup of yogurt at lunch and had been suspended and was waiting to be picked up.”

Smith asked the young girl if she would throw food in a restaurant, and she said she had never been in one, nor did she really have a family. The pre-teen had been living in a group home bouncing around in the foster care system for most of her life.

“I recognized that she needed something to go in her favor, maybe for once, that it hadn’t gone in her favor in the past, but she just needed somebody to help her.”

It turns out Jason and wife Marybeth Smith had struggled with infertility for some time and knew right away it was meant to be. Now, Raven is their adopted daughter. She is now studying social work at the University of Kentucky.