Key Sentence:
- When parents die from COVID-19 and abandon their children, who will help take care of them?
- This is a great question Megan Maloney asked via Ft. Myers, Florida-based organization The Charity Pros.
As Pro Travel’s charitable organization, which donates 50% of travel commissions booked through it, The Charity Pro’s raises money, raises awareness, and provides educational scholarships for Covid children. I recently spoke with founder Megan Maloney, a 24-year-old who suffers from Covid herself. With his father, Bradley, and Keith Hudson, Katy Perry’s father, the organization helped sponsor three fundraising concerts in Florida led by John Fogarty, “Cheap Trick and the Stranger”: November 20 (Tampa), November 21 (Estero), and November. 23 (Orland). Edited excerpts from a lengthy telephone conversation with Maloney followed.
Jim Clash: How did The Charity Pro come about?
Megan Maloney: We originally started it to support children’s Charity Children social causes. But when the pandemic hit, we quickly realized that much first aid and first-line workers were losing their battle with Covid. It broke our hearts. Then we saw the collection of donations for abandoned children. Almost nothing was done for them.
Clash: Perhaps inspired by the loss of someone in your family?
Maloney: early in the pandemic, a perfect friend, Tony Christensen, was the first Florida firefighter to die of Covid on the job. He is 56 years old. Tony helps evacuate the elderly from a nursing home in Naples. Several boys fell ill and were also hospitalized. It hit us pretty hard. Then we thought, how many first responders did this? We started researching and found The Guardian website tracking these people. Starting with about 300 or 400, then going on to a thousand, two thousand, three thousand families. So we started talking to them.
Clashes: Has something been done?
Maloney: Yes, some companies have donated millions of dollars on masks and medical equipment, and it’s been amazing. But nothing we could identify focused on neglected children. Worse still, many do not see their parents for weeks because they are quarantined or working in hospitals seven days a week. There are also several cemeteries. So we want to do something good for as many children as possible.