Corona del Sol junior Charlotte Gould advocates for children needing facial surgery
Dec 10, 2024, 5:14 AM
Charlotte Gould’s own experience sparked her path of giving back to a community she has been a part of since birth.
The current junior at Corona del Sol High School has used her own experience as a child to raise awareness, support and even lobby for children who require surgeries. She is a finalist for the Arizona Sports Character Counts Scholarship, presented by Parker & Sons.
“I was born with a cleft lip and palate,” Gould said. “Luckily I had a little teddy bear that I brought with me everywhere. It had cleft stitches on its lip and helped me to be brave.”
So she created a company to give other kids that same feeling of comfort.
Gould has been featured locally and nationally for Stitches by Charlotte, which sells and donates surgery companion dolls to children to lessen their fears and normalize their scars from needed surgeries. She even appeared several years ago on The Drew Barrymore Show.
Gould got the idea of creating dolls after she was given a sewing machine when she was 7 years old. She said learning to make a rag doll that looked like her inspired her to start her own company, which grew thanks to a grant from Jif peanut butter.
She said she’s created around 500 dolls for kids and distributed them across the country. The dolls come with a sewing kit, so families or kids can stitch their dolls to match their own stitches before or after surgery.
But Stitches by Charlotte is far from Gould’s only obligation these days.
Gould has become a craniofacial awareness advocate.
For a long time, she has raised money for the teddy bear program at Phoenix Children’s. For the past decade, she has helped with the Teddy Bear Picnic, which supports the hospital’s community of cleft patients and their families. She is on the Teen Board of Phoenix Children’s, which helps raise funds for prolonged hospital stays (Gould said the team raised $41,000 this year).
Gould has been an Operation Smile ambassador since she was 10 years old, raising money to fund cleft surgeries for children in impoverished countries. She has also spoken at their leadership conferences and this past summer went to Washington D.C. as an advocate for the ELSA (Ensuring Lasting Smiles Act) bill, “which ensures full and complete healthcare coverage to anyone born with a congenital abnormality.”
At school, Gould served as captain of the freshman and junior varsity cheer teams at Corona del Sol before making the varsity squad this year. She is junior class president, a member of the school’s Young Life program and on the Tempe Union High School District Superintendent Student Advisory Council.
Gould wants to attend a major university with a goal of majoring in political science with a concentration on international business. She then wants to attend law school to enter corporate law.
