MORE THAN A PAT ON THE BACK
Backpack drive: Volunteer helps supply school kids
Marsha Sanders, a cosmetics and fragrance manager at Bloomingdale’s in San Francisco, is accustomed to making people feel good about themselves with makeup and skin care. But every year, she helps to make hundreds of homeless kids happier, too — by helping them get ready for school.
She is a quiet but major force behind a backpack drive held by Hamilton Families, a local nonprofit that serves families with children. Among the 15 corporations, schools and other organizations enlisted to assist in the campaign, Sanders’ efforts provide the most — more than 330 last year. Starting in June, she and willing employees are assigned the name of at least one child for whom to shop and a list of goods they’ll need to start school on the right foot. By August, the homework is due: Backpacks filled with pencils, erasers, markers, loose-leaf paper, notebooks, binders, scissors and staplers, among other things.
Sanders, a self-proclaimed child of the ’60s who has supported Pets Unlimited, Muttville and Chinatown’s Cameron House, began assisting Hamilton Families by donating her son’s clothing in the nonprofit’s early days when it operated from a church basement in the Haight. She moved into holiday gift drives, Mother’s Day makeovers and beauty sessions for high-school girls on Teen Empowerment Day, and then backpacks in 2012.
“As I worked with the organization, I saw how hands-on they were, and the amount of empathy they had for the families and their sense of dignity in the giving process,” she said. “You really feel like you’re giving somebody a hand up.”
She’s on track to provide at least 300 backpacks this year, but the nonprofit needs at least 150 more: There are more than 400 children from first through 12th grades being served by Hamilton who are heading to school Aug. 21. A nonprofit official said the increase is because of the expansion of its Heading Home Campaign program, which aims to house 800 families by 2019 in an effort to end long-term homelessness. With each backpack costing an average of $50 to purchase and fill, Sanders’ efforts represent about $15,000 worth of goods, which allows the nonprofit to focus its $19 million annual operating budget on more pressing needs.
Shirley Lam, a Bloomingdale’s SK-II cosmetics counter worker and mother of two, has donated to the drive for six years, and this year paid for four backpacks. She came in at about $25 each by clipping coupons and watching for sales at Target, Office Depot and Staples. She found brand-name, $2 crayon packs for 50 cents, and $2.50 packages of magic markers for 97 cents, she said with pride.
“Honestly, when I was a kid, I remember not having lined paper and I looked over, and someone just let me borrow it,” Lam said. “If I’d had my own, that would have been nice. I felt left out, absolutely.”
Cecilia Orozco, who has worked on the cosmetics floor since the store opened in 2006, has contributed at least two and sometimes three backpacks each year, her own experience as a single mother always in the back of her mind.
“If I can buy a coffee every day for $6 or $7,” Orozco said, “why not do this for the kids?”
On a recent weekday, Sanders’ basement office was donation central, as employees brought fully stocked pink, peach, polka-dot and even cartoon-emblazoned backpacks downstairs and wedged them where they could onto a 7-foot-tall, three-tiered metal rolling rack already jammed with backpacks.
Sanders, noted Christina Alton, community partnerships manager at Hamilton Families, “is our angel and ambassador. We are grateful for her every day.”
“As I worked with the organization, I saw how hands-on they were, and the amount of empathy they had for the families, and their sense of dignity in the giving process.” Marsha Sanders