By Justin Jarrett
This is not your typical neighborhood lemonade stand.
Siblings Nate and Anne-Murphy Miller aren’t peddling watered-down Minute Maid to fill their piggy banks, they’re working to make a difference in the world — and a big one at that.
Anne-Murphy, 9, and Nate, 8, were inspired when Rev. John Dau spoke at Holy Trinity Classical Christian School, and the idea of Murphy’s Pucker Up was born. It started with selling their homemade recipe from their LemonAid Cart with a nebulous goal of helping to provide safe drinking water to schools in developing nations.
Using her connections, their mother, Jodie Miller of Plum Productions, found a way to make that goal more feasible. She eventually connected with LifeStraw, a company that has developed filtration systems that make contaminated water safe to drink. With that, the target became more clear – raise $2,500 to purchase five LifeStraw Community filtration systems. Doing so would provide clean water to 500 students at Good Shepherd Academy in Juba, South Sudan — Holy Trinity’s sister school — for up to five years.
“I don’t know if we as a family just can’t do things small, but it’s become this big deal,” Jodie Miller said with a laugh.
And despite mom’s help from time to time, it remains the kids’ project, for the most part. Anne-Murphy has the marketing personality, so she’s “out front,” while Nate is the math whiz who runs the credit cards, makes change, and crunches the numbers.
They’re about halfway to their goal, but a new partnership struck this week should help them make up the rest of the total.
Starting Friday, Murphy’s Pucker Up will be a staple on the lunch menu at Breakwater Restaurant and Bar. The kids were in the kitchen at Breakwater over the weekend perfecting their all-natural and preservative-free recipe, which the restaurant will produce in-house and serve in a special branded glass featuring the Murphy’s Pucker Up logo. The proceeds from every lemonade sale will go toward the clean water project.
“You can barely turn around without hearing something great that Breakwater is doing in the community,” Jodie Miller said. “I called Gary and Donna and explained what we were doing, and we had dinner, met, and squeezed about a bajillion lemons.”
