 Image: Google
Eight-year-old Tanitoluwa "Tani" Adewumi was living in a homeless shelter with his refugee family when he won the New York state championship for chess in his age range.
Now eleven and a proud student at Public School 116 in New York City, Tani is on his way to becoming the youngest person to ever achieve the title of grandmaster.
🇳🇬 Let's back up: Tani and his family are from Nigeria. Fearing violence from the Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram, the devout Christian family fled their home country to seek religious asylum in the United States in 2017. Tani was only seven.
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With no money or place to stay, the Adewumi family lived in a local homeless shelter for a while as they got their feet underneath them.
It was in that homeless shelter, using a makeshift board and pieces made out of Play-Doh, where Tani began to learn chess.
♟ A child prodigy… Tani’s parents couldn’t afford the fee for the chess club at school. But after seeing how naturally gifted the young student was, his teacher waved the tuition requirement – and soon Tani was practicing around ten hours after school each day.
This practice paid off. Tani went on to win the to win the state championship for kindergarten through third grade in 2019, a little over a year since he started playing. 🤯
 Images: CNN
😎 Wait, it gets better… Tani made national headlines with his 2019 wins and, to the family’s surprise, an overwhelming amount of support came rushing towards them.
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"One family, they paid for a year's rent in Manhattan, one family gave us in 2019 a brand-new Honda, and the Saint Louis Chess Club in Missouri invited the family and the coaches to come and pay a visit," Tani's father, Kayode Adewumi, told CNN. "A lot of people really helped us ... they donated money for us to get out from the shelter."
It was thanks to the incredible donations from strangers all over the world that Tani and his family were able to get out of the shelter and into a comfortable home for themselves in NY.
A GoFundMe page for the family has raised nearly $250,000, which will help support the family’s housing, legal, and educational needs as they work towards receiving their green cards.
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Any extra money has been donated to The Tanitoluwa Adewumi Foundation, an organization that will help other children in need.
📝 Bottom line: "We need to give back to the needy, because we know what it takes -- we've tasted everything… especially the chess community and the people that need help. That's why we put the money into the foundation, to help people," shared Kayode.
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