Girl, 6, Wins UNICEF Card Design Contest

Ivy Chang’s artwork will be sold to help thousands of underprivileged children in countries all over the world, but the 6-year-old from Studio City doesn’t think that her new-found fame is that big of a deal.

The first-grader is one of two winners of UNICEF’s third annual “Kids Help Kids” greeting card contest, for which some 4,000 children worldwide submitted designs.

UNICEF is the United Nations Children’s Fund, founded to meet the emergency needs of children in crisis areas around the world. Proceeds from the sale of UNICEF greeting cards go to provide food, health care and emergency assistance to children in 135 countries.

Ivy’s painting, emblazoned across the top with “Peace on Earth,” depicts her and two classmates riding a large white dove into the starry night sky. Ivy said she painted a dove “because it is a bird of peace.”

On the night she created the design, she told her mother, “Peace on Earth means don’t fight, share.”

Ivy and 11-year-old Nicole Anziani, from Richmond, Calif., each received $500 as contest winners. Both are being honored at the United Nations today at a reception, scheduled to feature Grammy Award-winning singer Judy Collins.

Ivy and Nicole’s designs, however, will not be available to shoppers this year, but sold exclusively at Pier 1 Imports stores for the 1995 holiday season.

As Ivy flipped through a thick book of her paintings in her living room, she said she was pleased that her greeting card design would help children ravaged by famine, starvation and war. “I was glad,” she said in a soft voice. Proceeds from the cards raise an average $7 million each year, said Gwendolyn Baker, president of the United States Committee for UNICEF, which runs the competition.

All students at Carpenter Avenue School in Studio City--where Ivy has been a student for two months--turned in designs for the contest as part of a homework assignment, Principal Joan Marks said.

“Ivy is an outstanding student, very innovative and artistic. . . . If the teacher introduces something, she takes it and runs with it,” Marks said.

When it was announced at school that she was one of the winners, her friends flocked to her, Ivy said. As her mother picked her up the day of the announcement, “her fellow students said she’s going to the United Nations . . . that’s cool,” said her mother, Ni Chang.

Ivy had never flown before her trip to New York on Tuesday and she was afraid that the airplane might fall. But that fear was soon overcome, her mother said. “Ivy said we still have to go to New York because it’s very important.”

The Chang family is happy about being able to assist UNICEF through their daughter, Ni Chang said. The only thing that worries her is how shy Ivy is and how she will react on a talk show called “Have a Heart,” on which she is scheduled to appear while in New York.

But media-savvy aside, Ivy has always been exceptional and creative, her mother said, adding that she was reciting the alphabet when she was 2 and now, at 6, she is reading at a fourth-grade level.

The Chang family does not speak English at home. Ni and James Chang left Taiwan 15 years ago. Ivy is fluent in Mandarin, but has learned English from educational tapes and television.