Charity champion at only 6

Breanna will fly to Wellington to meet the PM. Photo / Hawke's Bay Today

Breanna Newman doesn't own a mobile phone - but that didn't stop her collecting 468 for charity.

The 6-year-old was the individual winner of the "Phones for Starship" challenge to help the children's hospital in Auckland.

Schoolchildren nationwide were encouraged to collect and donate the old phones, which are being refurbished and resold to emerging world economies. Sixty per cent of the sale price goes back to the Starship.

Breanna's prize is a trip for two to Wellington with Air New Zealand to meet Prime Minister John Key at Parliament.

Breanna didn't know who Mr Key was before the competition, said her mother, Yvette Newman. "But now she watches him on the news."

She said Breanna had told her father about the challenge and he had sent 132 old phones from Australia.

"She was just telling everybody, pretty much," Ms Newman said. "She's done really well and it was for a really good cause, so that always makes it worthwhile."

Ms Newman's nephew collected phones from his friends and gave Breanna 32, and the Cellacc company in Hastings and Napier both made generous donations.

Breanna waited until the last date for entries, June 12, to take the phones to her school, Nelson Park in Napier, to make sure she got last-minute donations.

"She definitely thought it was fun," Ms Newman told the Hawke's Bay Today. "There were a few she'd have liked to have kept."

While Breanna doesn't have her own cellphone, she likes to use her mum's for texts.

Other competition winners included Matiere School in the King Country, which won the $5000 school award after its 20 students collected 290 phones.

Six schools also won a Fujifilm Finepix J20 digital camera. A total of 92 schools took part in the challenge, and their students collected more than 3200 phones for the Starship.

The hospital is still accepting donations of old mobile phones from the public.