We all know American Girl loves giving- they give away thousands of dolls a year to children's charities and hospitals. So when AG donated $575,000 worth of dolls and hundreds of thousands of dollars more to the Red Cross back at the end of 2017 for Nanea Mitchell's release, it just seemed like a little fitting kind gesture.

But thanks to an article about the dolls, the last of which are now finding homes, we finally know the origins about this campaign- and Nanea Mitchell's inspiration.

Nanea was inspired by a woman named Nana. A longtime American Red Cross Resiliency Facilitator volunteer with a story of disaster aid assistance and recovery during the Pearl Harbor bombings in Hawaii in 1941, she seemed like the perfect inspiration for Nanea.

But the doll came with a price for AG, one that they were very happy to pay: “[Nana] told American Girl, ‘If you’re going to be creating this doll in my image, you need to make a donation to the Red Cross’.”, said Yolanda Gainwell, the former SAF Director for the American Red Cross of the Greater Chesapeake Region.

This is very cool to find out! I'd love to find out more about Nana: but just learning more about Nanea's creation makes me happy, because it's hard to find out more about American Girl when you already know 99 percent of the information out there ;)