What would you do if you won $3,000? Pay off a few bills, take a vacation or perhaps tuck it away for a rainy day?

For 18-year-old Chelsea De La Torre, that chance came as a surprise April 23 when comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres telephoned the Sumner High senior while she ate dinner with her family and offered her the chance to play in the show’s Gold Digger segment, a game where contestants have 30 seconds to grab cash being blown by a fan inside of a booth.

“I wasn’t really expecting to hear from her,” De La Torre said. “I was screaming.”

The moment started a week earlier after Chelsea sent the Ellen Show an e-mail about how special her family is to her.

While she and DeGeneres spoke, a production crew and large truck pulled into her driveway, cash booth in tow.

“We all ran out there,” said Darlene De La Torre, Chelsea’s mom. “We all climbed on the flatbed and they invited Chelsea to go into the booth.”

“We ran over to this big old machine on this tow truck at the end of our driveway,” Chelsea said. “They shut it off and I got in it. They started playing music. I had to catch it all. It was so awesome; I think I spaced out for a while, it felt so surreal.”

As quickly as it started, the clock had finished ticking. But Chelsea, like many of the show’s other Gold Digger participants, kept going.

“I couldn’t hear it when the buzzer went off,” she said.

The fun didn’t stop once the fan stopped.

“Ellen told me to keep the money, even the money I couldn’t catch.”

That’s not all – the host threw in a year’s worth of her private-label pet food, Halo, for the family’s five dogs and three cats.

“That was absolutely terrific,” her mom said.

“I am really extremely thankful for that,” Chelsea said.

Chelsea paid her gratitude forward by donating 10 percent of the winnings to the Bonney Lake Food Bank, an effort that made her family proud.

“I was floored – it came from her,” Darlene said. “You always want to raise your kids to do their best for the community.”

Chelsea didn’t stop there; if a store donated $300, maybe the rest of the community would want to help out, too, she reasoned.

With the support of Albertsons and Bonney Lake Food Bank Director Stew Bowen, she hosted a food drive May 9 at the store’s entry. “We put out tables and we had a TV and laptop playing the Gold Digger segment that Ellen’s show had sent,” she said.

Friends, family and food bank volunteers pitched in to help. Within six hours the community had turned an offer to dig for gold into the chance to dig into their pocketbooks.

“One of the first donations I got was $20,” Chelsea said. “People were pulling money out of their wallets left and right.”

Bowen was touched with Chelsea’s selfless act.

“I was excited that this young woman has a heart to contribute to the goal of doing all we can do to make sure no one goes to bed hungry tonight,” he said.

Her pay-it-forward challenge worked and Chelsea presented Bowen with 350 pounds of food and $1,500.

“It felt really good,” she said. “It makes me want to do more good things. It took only six hours out of my day but it really benefitted my community.”