CASPER, Wyo. (AP) - Out of nowhere, Boone Donley starts making little “woop” “woop” woop” noises. He’s sitting in a plush white chair in the corner of the room, rosy-cheeked and composed. His felt cowboy hat rests brim-up in his lap.
“That’s what zebras sound like,” he explains. He proceeds to roar like a lion, then chirp like a cheetah.
He’s been lugging bags and boxes of toys from the trunk of his family’s car into the hallway of the Salvation Army on Jefferson Street. But now all the books and board games and stuffed animals have been moved, and he has a minute to chat about what this is really all about.
Boone and his mom, Lauren, started an anti-bullying campaign called Buck Off Bullying. And they’re delivering on their first big promise as an organization: to donate toys to as many kids as possible. The pair accomplished this goal through a month-long toy drive, and gathered enough goods for almost 200 kids.
But first, Boone wants to talk animals. They’re pretty much his favorite thing. Books on the topic are the only ones he’ll read, and his growing repertoire of animal noises is only the beginning of his knowledge. Plus, he has hands on experience. He keeps six hens in his backyard and last year won a top prize in 4-H for raising them, an award he displays proudly on a custom cowboy belt buckle gifted to him by his grandma.
Boone is also a rodeo fiend. His standard getup includes his trusty cowboy hat - complete with a feather - the ornamental button-up shirts standard of rodeo attire, pointed cowboy boots and, of course, the belt buckle. He estimates he’s been dressing like this without compromise pretty much every day since he was 4 years old.
Suffice it to say, he’s a passionate kid.
But last year, when Boone was a second-grader at Paradise Valley Elementary School, that big heart hurt him a bit.
“He was just getting the snot kicked out of him every day at school,” his mom Lauren says.
Boone is taller than the rest of his classmates. He’s 9 years old and already 5 feet tall. But that height doesn’t translate into menace. Lauren guesses that’s where the bullying started.
“I think they thought they can push around the biggest kid on the playground and he wouldn’t fight back,” she says. “Kids can be mean.”
When he started coming home with bruises everyday, Lauren got worried. The bullying had been escalating, and now it was getting physical. The school principal intervened and the bullying stopped, Lauren says, but the situation rattled Boone.
“It made me feel like I was being poached,” he says. “I thought I should just never go back to school and just stay in bed.”
But over the summer, as the family recuperated from what Lauren described as simply “a hard year,” they had an idea to try to turn the whole episode into something positive.
Boone bought 1,000 stickers - using his own money - emblazoned with the slogan “Buck Off Bullying” and the classic Wyoming cowboy silhouette. Then he handed them out during the College National Finals Rodeo. He’s since sent his stickers to 36 states, to schools and individuals who support his campaign.
The goal at first was just to raise awareness and to remind people to intervene when they spotted a bully. They launched their kindness campaign on Instagram. Lauren says she felt it was a more positive platform than Facebook.
They felt their mission fulfilled when a high school girl instant messaged their Instagram account looking for help. She was being bullied, Lauren says, and was thinking about hurting herself.
“She didn’t think anyone cared about her,” Boone says.
They connected the girl to some people who could better help the situation, and have been checking in on her periodically. Lauren says that one interaction alone is enough to make all the work worth it.
But what started as a simple sticker campaign has evolved into something entirely different. Boone and Lauren want to broaden their reach.
“It’s taken over our lives in the best way,” Lauren says.
Lauren got the idea to do a toy drive from a tradition in her own family. They set up a bin at the Sandy Widmer Farmers Insurance Office and collected toys for about a month.
Their drive wrapped up Dec. 15, and they collected enough toys to cover between 150 and 175 kids, according to Lauren’s estimation. They also used the donations to put together bags for the eight children now living at the Wyoming Rescue Mission. Those bags have a coat, a blanket, three toys, a creative item and a stuffed animal. They also took 42 stuffed animals to Casper’s Court Appointed Special Advocates office.
Lauren says she thinks giving back is crucial to what Buck Off Bullying is meant to promote.
“I think if you teach kindness, it becomes second nature.” and that sets kids up to not be bullies, she says.
Next, Lauren is trying to register Buck Off Bullying as a nonprofit. Boone wants the organization to offer rodeo scholarships.
“I don’t know many 9 year olds that have a heart of service like he does,” she says.
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