Make a Difference

In 1994, a little girl named Nora appeared on The Oprah Show with her father, Ted, to talk about her Penny Harvest project. She and other children collected pennies, which added up to $1,000 to help different organizations. "I started thinking, if you could do that, I wonder what I could do?" Oprah says. That question led to the launch of Oprah's Angel Network in 1997, and since then, viewers' generous donations have helped raise over $72 million.

Now, Nora is a senior at Princeton University—and she's still collecting pennies! "We're at $6 million in pennies," she says. "It's now a yearlong educational program, and it's the children themselves that give all the money away—9,000 grants, 20 million hours of service projects." Learn more about Nora's organization, Common Cents, at CommonCents.org.