Six Children Honored on the 2025 OneLegacy Donate Life Rose Parade® Float Featuring Scene from Japan’s Beloved Children’s Day Celebration

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Six Children Honored on the 2025 OneLegacy Donate Life Rose Parade® Float Featuring Scene from Japan’s Beloved Children’s Day Celebration

2025-01-03 02:46 Last Updated At：03:12

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 2, 2025--

The 2025 OneLegacy Donate Life Rose Parade® float, Let Your Life Soar, paid homage to the Japanese tradition of Children’s Day and shared the stories of six children honorees, as well as six others who either received their first lifesaving transplant when they were children, or who dedicated their lives to promote the good health and well-being of youth.

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The beautiful float, which is a fan and media favorite among the iconic Rose Parade® lineup every New Year’s Day also received one of the highest awards from the Tournament of Roses judges, who bestowed OneLegacy the Extraordinaire Award for the most extraordinary float.

With ages ranging from 2 to 17 years old, these six children shared amazing stories of resilience, perseverance and hope.

The 2025 OneLegacy Donate Life float, Let Your Life Soar, featured two teenagers who received lifesaving transplants.

15-year-old Jaylee Bou-Silverio was the youngest float rider this year. Jaylee received her transplant when she was an infant from OneLegacy Ambassador and 2018 float walker, Elaine Jones. “ Elaine gave me life, and I am so happy to be able to share my story and inspire others to say YES to organ donation at this year’s Rose Parade,” said Jaylee.

17-year-old Roza Saad was the second youngest float rider. Roza received a heart and double lung transplant at the age of 12, after being diagnosed with severe pulmonary hypertension. Thanks to her donor, Roza is now a thriving college student, growing stronger and actively serving others in her community. “This was the experience of a lifetime, and I will never forget being on the Rose Parade and connecting with other transplant recipients, living donors and donor families. I also want to thank my Donor Network West team for being the absolute best and making this experience so special,” said Roza.

Two additional transplant recipients received a lifesaving transplant at an early age, and one living donor gave the gift of life to an infant. They are:

Four children, whose images were memorialized with floral portraits or floragraphs were honored on the 2025 OneLegacy Donate Life float, these children’s parents made the difficult and courageous decision to say “YES” to donation, giving the ultimate gift of life to save and heal others through the power of organ, eye and tissue donation.

The four children honored on the 2025 OneLegacy Donate float include:

“We are so proud of sharing Sire’s story with the world as part of the 2025 Rose Parade on New Year’s Day,” said Alex Porchia and Alyssa Vanna, Sire Porchia’s parents. “We would like to thank OneLegacy for allowing us to connect with other donor families, by sharing the same experience of loss and grief. We focused on the positive and by donating Sire’s heart valves, we made the decision to help others avoid the same pain of losing a family member. May Sire’s Legacy live on in others. He bravely donated his most important organ, too, his strong heart.”

In addition to these children, three floragraph honorees dedicated their lives to serve children. They are:

The OneLegacy Donate Life Rose Parade float is produced by OneLegacy, designed by Charles Meier, built by Artistic Entertainment Services (AES) and made possible thanks to more than 20 sponsors.

As the world’s most visible campaign to inspire organ, eye and tissue donation, the OneLegacy Donate Life Rose Parade® float inspires viewers to help the over 1 million people in need of organ, eye or tissue transplants each year. Register today to become an organ, eye or tissue donor by visiting registerme.org.

Jimmy Carter's funeral begins by tracing 100 years from rural Georgia to the world stage

2025-01-05 09:00 Last Updated At：09:10

ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) — Jimmy Carter 's extended public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped casket tracing his long arc from the Depression-era South and family farming business to the pinnacle of American political power and decades as a global humanitarian.

Those chapters shone throughout the opening stanza of a six-day state funeral intended to blend personalized memorials with the ceremonial pomp afforded to former presidents. The longest-lived U.S. executive, Carter died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

“He was an amazing man. He was held up and propped up and soothed by an amazing woman,” son James Earl “Chip” Carter III, told mourners at The Carter Center late Saturday afternoon, referring to his father and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023. “The two of them together changed the world. And it was an amazing thing to watch so close.”

Grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center's governing board, said, “It's amazing what you can cram into a hundred years.”

Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse rode first Saturday through his hometown of Plains, which at about 700 residents is not much bigger than when Carter was born there Oct. 1, 1924. The procession stopped at the farm where the future president toiled alongside the Black sharecroppers who worked for his father. The motorcade continued to Atlanta, stopping in front of the Georgia Capitol where Carter served as a state senator and reformist governor.

Finally, he arrived for his last visit to the Carter Presidential Center, which houses his presidential library and The Carter Center where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, setting a new standard for what former presidents can accomplish after they yield power.

“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter told the assembly that included some of the center's 3,000 employees worldwide. “You continue the vibrant living legacy of what is my grandfather’s life work,” he added.

Pallbearers on Saturday came from the Secret Service that protected the Carters for almost a half-century and a military honor guard that included Navy servicemembers for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to reach the Oval Office. A military band played “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander in chief who also was a devout Baptist.

His longtime personal pastor, the Rev. Tony Lowden, remembered not a president but the frail man who spent the last 22 months in hospice care, “wrapped in a blanket” that included the words of Psalm 23.

Chip Carter recalled “the boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but also the father who spent an entire Christmas break learning Latin and teaching his 8th-grade son who had failed a test. When he took that test again, the younger Carter said, he aced it: “I owed it to my father, who spent that kind of time with me.”

Jimmy Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center from 7 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Tuesday, with the public able to pay respects around the clock.

Scott Lyle, an engineer who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York, was among the first mourners to pay his respects. Lyle said he joined Carter to build homes with Habitat for Humanity for the first time in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. Since then, he has traveled around the world to build houses with the group.

“I got to see, what some people don’t get to see, close. He was an amazing man, and he cared about others. He walked the walk,” said Lyle, who was wearing Carter-themed Habitat gear. “And I can’t think of anyone else that I would want to stand in line to pay my respects for.”

National rites will continue in Washington and conclude Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years near the home they built before his first state Senate campaign in 1962.

The Carters lived nearly all their lives in Plains, with the exception of his Naval service, four years in the Governor's Mansion and four years in the White House. As his hearse rolled through the town, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president and his signature smile.

Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.

“This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains. Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small Southern town like his — something he worries isn’t likely to happen again.

Indeed, Carter helped plan his own funeral to emphasize that his remarkable rise to the world stage was because of — not despite — his deep rural roots.

Over the course of a few blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed near where the Carters ran the family peanut warehouse, and the small home where his mother, a nurse, had delivered the future first lady in 1927. The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters — a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar U.S. presidential campaigns of the 21st century.

At the Carter farm, a few dozen National Park Service rangers stood in formation in front of the home, which did not have running water or electricity when Carter was a boy. The old farm bell rang 39 times to honor Carter's place as the 39th president.

Beside the house, there remains the tennis court that Carter's father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family — a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president's upbringing. Carter worked the land throughout the Great Depression, but it was owned by the elder Carter, who employed the surrounding Black tenant farmers during the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Carter wrote and spoke extensively on those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his policies in government and human rights work.

Calvin Smyre, a former Georgia legislator, remembered that legacy Saturday at the state Capitol. Smyre, who is Black, said Carter’s repudiation of racial segregation allowed Black people to wield power in Georgia.

“We stand on the shoulder of courageous people like Jimmy Carter,” Smyre said. “What he did shocked and shook the political ground here in the state of Georgia. And we live better because of that.”

Payne reported from Plains, Georgia.

Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.