While school has been in full swing for several weeks now, millions of students are still struggling to afford adequate school supplies. With more than 16 million U.S. children living below the poverty line, many may go without notebooks or pencils to write with all year, according to the Kids in Need Foundation.
That’s why the Opus Foundation® recently awarded a $5,000 Opportunity Fund grant to the Kids in Need Foundation to purchase 225 backpacks and fill them with school supplies for students at Douglass High School, in Columbia, Mo.
Two hundred of those backpacks were filled with materials for high school students, such as notebooks, folders, pens, pencils, highlighters and Post-it Notes. The remaining 25 backpacks were filled with crayons, markers, scissors, notebooks and folders for the younger Pre-K students in the building. In addition to the grant, my fellow associates from St. Louis and Kansas City who have been working on District Flats, our first project in Columbia, Mo., took an afternoon off recently to help distribute the backpacks and meet the students at Douglass High School.
The Kids in Need Foundation strives to ensure every child is prepared to learn by providing them with the tools they need to succeed. Serving 3.6 million students and more than 120,000 teachers every year, the Foundation has distributed more than $550 million in school supplies to low-income schools at no cost to them.
We are proud to work with admirable organizations like the Kids in Need Foundation that better our communities every day through education and encouragement. Opus strives to give back to every community we work in, making all of them better places to live, work and raise families.
Opus Foundation® Fills Backpacks for Kids in Need
