The cosplay community is known for many things; elaborate work, incredible craftsmanship, original designs, but at times it seems to get over taken by the drama. For an outsider looking in it can seem like a high school drama.  But every now and again you see something amazing come from it. Ani-Mia this christmas season decided to use her large fan base to run a toy drive which raised around $1,700 in donations.

We had a chance to talk to her and this is what she had to say. What made you come up with the idea?

I usually do Giving Tree every year which is where you pick a child to buy Christmas gifts for. I took a look at my page and thought about how many more kids I could get Christmas gifts for if I was able to get my fanbase to help out. So I decided to make it my own Internet toy drive.

The logistics seem hard because how do you coordinate people all over the world to donate to one toy drive?

Using Paypal, I was able to accept donations which I then went and bought toys with.

I knew there might be those that didn’t believe what I was doing so I made sure that every step of the process was very transparent. I made sure to publicly acknowledge donors, post pictures of the toys I bought with their donations, and really that ended up inspiring more people to donate. Some of my followers even started to make a challenge out of it with each other to raise the goal of the donation each time.

What started off with Ani-Mia just donating $100 to charity, turned into raising almost $1,700 in total donations and filling a car with toys.

All toys were donated to the Central Union Mission in downtown Washington DC for their Operation Christmas Miracle Toy Drive.

Any closing words Mia?

I hope that this inspires more cosplayers to organize something like this next year. That saying, with great power, comes great responsibility and for me it translated to, I have this following already there so why don’t I try to use it for good.