Protecting Children: A Year-End Call to Action

Rio Marie Allred was a vivacious, beautiful, sarcastic, and witty 12-year-old girl from Elkhart, Indiana. Rio loved creating and drawing, was an avid reader who completed the entire Harry Potter series at a young age, and enjoyed camping and kayaking with her family and rocking out with her best friend, Lili. In December 2020, Rio began experiencing hair loss. What started subtly became more aggressive over time, and Rio was eventually diagnosed with alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes the body to attack its hair follicles.

When Rio started middle school in the fall of 2021, she was severely bullied because of her condition. She was taunted and called horrific names. Students took her wigs and hats from her head, and she endured physical assaults on a regular basis.

Rio’s parents, Aaron and Niki Ball, repeatedly met with school officials at multiple levels of administration seeking protection for their daughter. Despite their continued pleas for help, the severe bullying remained unresolved.

On Monday, March 14, 2022, Rio died by suicide. She was only 12 years old.

Rio was, and remains, fiercely loved by her family and friends, as well as by countless people who never had the opportunity to meet her. Rio’s Rainbow was established in her honor to create meaningful change, protect children from abuse and bullying, and ensure that no family is forced to endure the devastating and preventable loss of a child they love.

Today, Aaron and Niki remain deeply involved in frontline child-safety work across Indiana. They continue this work because the same gaps in school accountability, safety, mental-health resources, intervention, and oversight that contributed to Rio’s death still exist. Children throughout Indiana continue to be abused, bullied, neglected, and lost to suicide at alarming rates, while too many parents are left pleading with the very systems responsible for protecting them.

Rio’s story is not an isolated tragedy. It is a call to action.

From Heartbreak to Action

Rio’s Rainbow works to ensure that every child can attend school and grow within their community without fear, free from physical, emotional, and psychological harm. We advance this mission through:

Child-safety and anti-bullying advocacy
Direct support and resources for children and families
Community education and prevention initiatives
Grants supporting child safety, youth wellness, and family advocacy
Legislative reform and stronger institutional accountability
Collaboration with parents, educators, organizations, and state leaders
Long-term systems change that prevents harm before tragedy occurs

We believe children deserve more than sympathy after they have been harmed. They deserve prevention, protection, accountability, and meaningful action.

The Indiana Child Safety Campaign

Alongside other grassroots organizations, parents, youth, survivors, advocates, educators, and community leaders, Rio’s Rainbow helped launch the Indiana Child Safety Campaign, a growing, parent- and community-led movement working to make child safety a top legislative and budgetary priority throughout Indiana.

Through years of advocacy and direct work with children and families, we have learned that the gaps threatening children do not exist within one school, agency, county, or community. They exist across nearly every state system serving children, including:

Schools and educational institutions
The Department of Child Services and child-welfare system
Healthcare and mental-health systems
Juvenile and family courts
Youth-serving organizations and community institutions

The Indiana Child Safety Campaign brings families, advocates, professionals, community organizations, and policymakers together to identify these systemic gaps and advance comprehensive reforms. Our work focuses on strengthening prevention, expanding mental-health and family resources, improving reporting and investigations, enforcing school and institutional accountability, protecting children’s and parental rights, and creating independent oversight and transparency across child-serving systems.

Our vision is an Indiana where every elected official, agency, institution, and community recognizes protecting children as its highest responsibility, and where families no longer have to wait until a child is seriously harmed before someone acts.

Rethinking What Giving Means

Immediate assistance and charitable relief are important. They help families survive difficult moments, access critical resources, and begin healing. But charity alone cannot repair the systems that failed Rio, or the systems that continue to fail children throughout Indiana today.

We must rethink what donating and volunteering mean in the movement to protect children.

A contribution to Rio’s Rainbow does more than respond after harm has occurred. It invests in the community organizing, parent leadership, advocacy, education, and systems-change work required to address the root causes of child abuse, bullying, neglect, institutional failures, and youth mental-health crises.

Rio’s Rainbow is one of the few grassroots organizations in Indiana committed not only to helping children and families after a crisis, but also to confronting and changing the conditions that allowed the crisis to happen.

Because charity helps, but lasting change protects and heals.

Help Us Raise $50,000

Rio’s Rainbow is launching our first year-end giving campaign with a goal of raising $50,000 by December 31st.

Funds raised will help support:

Child-safety, youth-wellness, and family-advocacy grants
Direct resources and advocacy support for children and families
Community education and prevention initiatives
Statewide legislative and institutional reform
Public awareness and child-safety campaigns
Community organizing to grow the Indiana Child Safety Campaign throughout the state
The volunteers, technology, outreach, compliance, and organizational infrastructure required to responsibly sustain this work

A portion of every dollar raised will help expand the Indiana Child Safety Campaign into more communities, ensuring that parents, youth, survivors, advocates, and local organizations across Indiana have opportunities to share their experiences, organize collectively, and influence the decisions affecting children’s safety.

Your contribution is more than a donation. It helps ensure families are heard, children are supported, communities are organized, institutions are held accountable, and urgently needed child-safety reforms continue moving forward.

Every gift, regardless of size, becomes part of a larger promise:

What happened to Rio must never happen to another child!

Give in Rio’s honor. Give for every child suffering in silence. Give for every parent fighting to protect their child. Give for the advocates and community members working every day to build systems that prevent harm instead of merely responding after tragedy occurs.

Together, we can transform heartbreak into action and build an Indiana where every child is protected, valued, supported, and free to be exactly who they are.

Help us protect children, strengthen families, transform systems, and build safer communities across Indiana.

Protecting Children: Rio’s Rainbow 2026 Year-End Giving Campaign

Our goal is to raise $50,000 by December 31st to fund child-safety grants and sustain the advocacy, education, outreach, and operations that make this work possible in Indiana.