SCOTTSDALE, AZ — What started as a way to pass time during the COVID-19 pandemic turned into a labor of love to help those in need, one tiny detail at a time.
Bella Zamora, an 8th-grader at Cocopah Middle School, is an aspiring interior designer who got hooked on building dollhouses. She said it all started a few years ago when she started watching dollhouse-building videos online. The designers in those videos would create their tiny homes and sell them to raise money for charities, and she wanted to do the same.
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She shared photos of some of her creations that include tiny assets like miniatures of popular Stanley cups, monogrammed pillows, designer purses on end tables, and Apple computers.
"At first they were just for me, but I saw how much other people loved them, and I thought what if my passion could make a difference in my community?" Zamora told ABC15.
ABC15 learned Zamora donated her first dollhouse to her elementary school auction where it raised about $1,000 for school programs.
Two more dollhouses are in the works and Zamora plans to auction them off through Lymphoma Society Derby Day Auction and People Acting Now Discover Answers (PANDA).
Her goal is to build two dollhouses each year through high school, which she will make to support even more charities.