Charity Work and Politics
Together with Smith, Pinkett Smith has created the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland, a charity which focuses on youth in urban inner cities and family support. Her aunt, Karen Banfield Evans, is the foundation's executive director. The charity was awarded the David Angell Humanitarian Award by The American Screenwriters Association (ASA) in 2006. The Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation has provided grants to non-profit organizations such as YouthBuild, and Pinkett Smith has made personal donations to organizations such as Capital K-9s.
While attending the Baltimore School for the Arts, Pinkett Smith met and became friends with classmate Tupac Shakur. They maintained a close friendship until his death in September 1996. In December 2006, she donated $1 million to the Baltimore School for the Arts in his memory.
When Pinkett Smith's aunt, Karen Banfield Evans, was diagnosed with lupus, the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, in association with the Lupus Foundation of America and Maybelline, held the first annual "Butterflies Over Hollywood" event on September 29, 2007 at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. The event raised funds for LFA public and professional educational programs. The Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation was presented with an award in 2007 at the 4th Annual Lupus Foundation of America Awards.
In 2012, on behalf of PETA, Pinkett Smith wrote a letter to Baltimore's mayor, asking that the visiting Ringling Brothers Circus "comply with Baltimore’s absolute prohibition of the use of devices such as bullhooks" and not harm the elephants.
Read more about this topic: Jada Pinkett Smith
Famous quotes containing the words charity work, charity, work and/or politics:
“Reputation is not of enough value to sacrifice character for it.”
—“Miss Clark,” U.S. charity worker. As quoted in Petticoat Surgeon, ch. 9, by Bertha Van Hoosen (1947)
“Having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.”
—Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
“To do his work well a workman must first sharpen his tools.”
—Chinese proverb.
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)