Monica Oxenreiter, a sophomore at Mt. Lebanon High School, thinks big when it comes to raising money for diabetes research.

With her Zip the Cure campaign, which she launched on World Diabetes Day in November, she aims to bring in a whopping $4.2 million for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation by raising $100 in each of the more than 42,000 ZIP codes in the United States.

Zip the Cure's Web site -- www.zipthecure.com -- shows her progress. A yellow map of the United States is colored green in the ZIP codes where $100 has been donated.

The Pittsburgh area has some splashes of green, such as in the Brentwood 15227, West Mifflin 15122 and Bethel Park 15102 ZIP codes. But most of the map is still yellow.

People can still donate if their ZIP code has already been spoken for, Monica said. They can choose to sponsor another ZIP code. Donors also can contribute less than $100 and the amounts will be added within a ZIP code to reach $100, she said.

Her hope is to reach the $4.2 million goal by May, but she said she might need to push back her self-imposed deadline.

Diabetes has been part of Monica's life for as long as she can remember. When Monica, now 15, was 13 weeks old, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Her older brother, John, now a sophomore at Columbia University in New York, was diagnosed when he was 8 years old.

"It adds a whole other dimension to everything we do," she said. "It's just an extra burden for us to carry."

The Oxenreiter family has been involved with Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation activities for more than a decade, with Monica and John serving as Pennsylvania delegates to the organization's Children's Congress.

The foundation was a natural choice to support, so Monica sought and received approval from the organization to become a third-party fundraiser and a nonprofit.

Since the launch date Nov. 14, Monica has been coordinating the national campaign, recruiting her siblings and other people connected to the foundation to become state captains.

After school and on weekends, she is busy checking the mail, keeping track of checks, filling out tax receipts, making deposits and writing thank-you notes, her parents said.

"It's quite a bit of logistics doing the administrative part of it," said her mother, Carol Oxenreiter.

Donations can be made and ZIP codes sponsored at www.zipthecure.com.

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