Changing the World

Soon after seeing the children's bedtime routine, Genevieve had an Aha! moment. "I was sitting on the subway, and like a raindrop, the words 'pajama program' went into my brain," she says. "And I said, 'That's it! That's it! Pajamas.'"

Genevieve got to work right away. She approached an after-school program for child victims of abuse and pitched her idea. "[They] said, 'That would be great! Nobody thinks of that. Nobody gives pajamas,'" she says.

The next time she visited the shelter, Genevieve had a shopping bag full of pj's—a pair for each child. "[A] girl came in, and she must have been 6 or 7, and she looks and she says to me quietly, 'What are these?'" Genevieve says. "I said, 'They're pajamas. You wear them to sleep. What do you wear at night?' And she said, 'My pants.'"

After that, Genevieve knew that one shopping bag of pajamas wouldn't cut it. She told everyone she knew about her mission, and she gathered as many pj's as she could. In just five years, Genevieve collected more than 85,000 pairs of pajamas for needy children!