Many hands together can make quite the impact and together with local nonprofit Back 2 School Illinois, Deloitte employees swapped out a day of helping clients to help local kids in need. The South Side YMCA of Metro Chicago hosted the event, which had a simple but meaningful goal: to create school supply kits for kids that cannot afford them.
The Back 2 School Illinois “Build A Kit” program launched to help companies give back and volunteer together while supporting this amazing cause. As a part of Deloitte’s Impact Day, employees gathered at the South Side YMCA to spend the day filling, organizing, and sorting boxes with school supplies. These kits will eventually be distributed throughout the area to kids in need. Additionally, Deloitte employees have raised over $5,000 to help purchase needed supplies.
“I’ve been with Deloitte for seven years and every year, I participate in our annual Impact Day. We do this at over 900 sites all across the country and I think it’s a wonderful opportunity that our business closes shop for a day so that we can volunteer for the organization of our choice,” says Matthew Krajcer, tax manager at Deloitte and the Back 2 School Illinois board member, who organized the event. “Our goal today is to put together 2,500 school kits—1,000 will go to military families in need to thank them for the work that they do and the other 1,500 will go to low income families because we know that they need the boost to kickstart their school year.”
Back 2 School Illinois is the largest school supply distribution program in the state. In 2014 alone, it provided over 850,000 school supplies to more than 28,000 underprivileged children, but the work of Deloitte and other corporate partners is essential in expanding its reach.
“Every year in Illinois, there are over a million children from low income families. In a perfect world, we would be able to provide school supplies to all one million of those kids each year,” explains Back 2 School Illinois CEO Matthew Kurtzman.
Although the South Side YMCA of Metro Chicago was the location for prepping the school supply kits, its collaboration with Back 2 School Illinois goes much deeper.
“The Y stands on a number of pillars—one being academic readiness—and Back 2 School Illinois provides families with the opportunity to have classroom supplies,” says Reginald Armstrong, senior membership experience director for the South Side YMCA. “We are a neighborhood partner to underprivileged families who may not be able to afford these supplies for all children in the household.”
Although school supplies may seem to be a small donation for many, the impact of these school supply kits do not go unnoticed by the families who receive them.
“I am thankful for having one less pressure as a single parent,” says Angela Brown, a parent and current college student who credits Back 2 School Illinois school kits for helping her children become prepared for school. “It is clear that the need for these school supply boxes are great—not only for me, but for all low income families.”
In addition to grateful parents, the kids receiving school supply kits are also positively empowered to start their school year off in the best way possible.
Kurtzman adds: “Aside from reducing some of the stress on parents, there’s the self esteem component for the kids, which is a really big part of what we do. Imagine what it’s like for a child to walk into class on the first day of school and see his classmates have things that he doesn’t. Can he succeed at school when he doesn’t even have the basics like pens, pencils, and paper?”
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