CLE ELUM — Ripken Braman, a sports-loving, blue-eyed 9-year-old with a heart for helping people, is a shy youngster short on words but long on action.

Case in point: the food drive Ripken has started to help feed the hungry in honor of an 11-year-old Bothell boy he’s never met.

The boy, Brenden Foster, has leukemia and is near death.

One day, riding home from a doctor’s appointment, Brenden went by tent city, a Seattle area community of homeless people who live in tents.

He wanted to help them.

News of Brenden’s wish mobilized volunteers who showed up to distribute sandwiches to the tent city residents as a tribute to Brenden.

The effort’s expanded.

“It snowballed into people not only helping the homeless but the hungry,” Janet Braman, Ripken’s mother said.

Now KOMO TV, which has been following Brenden’s story, is running a food drive in Brenden’s honor, with donations scheduled to be donated to Northwest Harvest, an organization that serves food banks.

Enter Ripken.

He saw TV coverage on Brenden and told his mother,

he wanted to help make Brenden’s dream of helping people come true.

Braman made a flyer, but she told Ripken he would have to be the one to make the project go.

“He was in charge. It wasn’t my project, it was his project,” Braman said.

Last week, Ripken shyly approached his third-grade teacher Bonnie Christian about the project. He got an enthusiastic response.

“I thought it was amazing that he thought of this,” Christian said. “We hear about so many of these things in the news but we don’t usually take off and run with them. He did.”

And true to his mother’s insistence that if he were going to do the project he would be the one speaking for it, he was the one who explained what he wanted to do to his classmates.

By last Friday, just a day after the project began, bags and boxes of groceries sat in the classroom.

Word had gone out through the school. Christian had arrived Friday to find a box of groceries outside her classroom door.

Ripken and both his brothers have big hearts, their mother said.

Collecting food for the hungry is a good way to help — and a reminder that while they don’t lack for anything, not everyone is so fortunate.

“All the boys have huge hearts,” Braman said. “They always want to give, whether to friends or others. It’s what we’ve tried to instill in them. It’s nice to know it’s sunk in.”

Ripken’s project has inspired his aunt in Federal Way who works for Boeing Employees Credit Union (BECU) to also organize a food drive in honor of Brenden, Braman said.

KOMO is collecting the donated food this coming Thursday at several other Puget Sound area locations. Braman says she’ll come to the school after lunch that day to pick up the donations. Ripken and his classmates will help load the food. Braman will drive it to a drop-off site in Issaquah.

Ripken will go with his mother — unless her Suburban is so full of food there’s no room for him.

That’s what he’s hoping for.

You can help.

Donations of non-perishable food may be left at Cle Elum-Roslyn Elementary School until Thursday.