San Diego City Wire

Lauren Staudinger has been donating profits from selling $5 bags of dried fruit to help in funding the San Diego COVID-19 Community Response Fund.

A press release from The San Diego Foundation said the seventh-grader's $450 contribution "equated to the amount needed to help a family in City Heights pay their rent, a single mom in El Cajon buy groceries and cover her utility bills, or a housing-insecure college student afford car repairs needed to commute to work."

The San Diego COVID-19 Community Response Fund page said that the number of COVID-19 cases exceeds 230,000, and so far, more than $64 million has been raised.

"It doesn't matter how old you are, whether you're 7 or 70, whether you only have $5 or $500. It's going to make a difference in someone's life, and it's going to have an impact," said Staudinger, who is a seventh-grader at Warren-Walker Middle School.

According to Staudinger's father, his daughter got the idea to use a dehydrator that the family never used and pick fruits from an orchard she rides horses in so she could dehydrate and sell them for a good cause.

According to the release, Staudinger then taught herself how to dehydrate the fruit by watching YouTube videos.

"Laurel consulted with her older sister, a 2-1-1 operator at the time, for ideas on a worthy cause. The response – the San Diego COVID-19 Community Response Fund," the release said.

Staudinger said she went to the fund's website, and once seeing it was a good cause to donate to, she decided that was where she wanted to donate the proceeds. She began working on dehydrating the fruit "most of [the] last spring and through the summer," with the hand-sliced fruit and did everything herself.

"I thought maybe I'd only be able to sell a few bags of dried fruit to friends and family. But word got around. It tasted great," Staudinger said. "It was sweet. People really liked it."