Familiar Faces
Always on the go I
Photos by Mansoor Ahmad
NAME:
Madison Harbarth AGE 15
HOMETOWN: Mankato
FAVORITE SUBJECT IN SCHOOL: English
FAVORITE TAYLOR SWIFT SONG: There is way too many but probably “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)”
16 • FEBRUARY 2022 • MANKATO MAGAZINE
At 15, Madison Harbarth lets nothing stop her from achieving her goals
f you’re a loyal reader of The Free Press, you may already be familiar with Madison Harbarth. We featured her in a 2014 story that, while it mentioned the rare disorder she was born with called sacral agenesis syndrome, was mostly about how inspiring she was just living the life of a normal kid. In fact, the reason we did that story back then is because Madison was part of Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare’s “Cure Pity” campaign, which sought to remove the stigma about people with disabilities. She was fiercely independent then, and still is today. For most of Madison’s life, she’s been involved with the Children’s Miracle Network, an organization that raises money for local hospitals to fund critical lifesaving treatments and health care services. She’ll explain more about that in a moment. But she was asked recently to contribute a drawing for them, and they ended up using it in their annual calendar. Mankato Magazine: You recently had some artwork published in the annual ACE Hardware calendar. Tell us how you scored that gig. Madison Harbarth: I had Nancy Hefko from Children’s Miracle Network reach out and ask me to draw some pictures for thank-yous and then they chose one of my pictures to put in the calendars. I really started to draw during quarantine as I found that sometimes it is easier to draw things out than speak them in words, or just to express my thoughts. My involvement with The Children’s Miracle Network has been ongoing since I was around age 5. We were asked to go to Washington to speak to several politicians who wanted to know about what pediatric health care has done for us. We met with U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken to tell them how pediatric health care is very important. From there we started to help at Minnesota State University with fundraising for the Dance Marathon. It’s like a college competition among the Greek organizations raising money to help the CMN. I go and speak (well, my mom does) to explain my story and how their money helps kids like me.
