United Way seeks donations to gift 5,000 backpacks, school supplies

While school’s out for the summer, United Way of Yuma County (UWYC) is busy ensuring kids have the school supplies they need come next school year. This June, the nonprofit organization kicked off its annual Drive for School Supplies. Through this program, local students in need receive backpacks filled with various school supplies. After surveying every local school from Yuma, San Luis, Wellton, Dateland, Somerton and San Pasqual, UWYC found that Yuma County’s children are in need of a little over 5,000 backpacks.

“The whole aim of the program is we want to eliminate as many barriers as possible that may be preventing our students from having the best school year possible,” said UWYC Executive Director Karina Jones. “So oftentimes depending on the level of income of families or depending on the student and the income level of their family, not everyone always comes to school with the supplies that they need.”

As a parent herself, Jones noted that the school lists for her daughters are each a page long and especially now with inflation, the costs for backto-school shopping can easily add up to something expensive.

Before COVID, UWYC would hold various drives town to ask for school supplies and then pack the backpacks with those supplies, but now the backpacks purchased come prefilled with school supplies. Fortunately, a donation of $12 is all it takes to cover the cost of one of these backpacks.

“So that’s what we put out to the community: that if you can just donate $12, you are sponsoring a backpack filled with school supplies,” Jones said. “That’s really our goal is just if everyone can sponsor one student or one backpack at $12 … and the other goal of the program is also to alleviate some of the burden that the teachers carry as well. We sent out surveys and one of the questions that we asked was ‘How much do you spend yearly on school supplies for your classroom?’ And the majority of the answers were $500+.

‘They spend $500 of their own money on school supplies, so if we can get their students already coming into school with the school supplies that they’ve requested, then we feel like we’re also helping the teachers in that sense. And we also have these teacher bags that we distribute and the teacher bags have Expo markers, they have hand sanitizer, they have Kleenex boxes, they have glue sticks–just some of the random things that we know that teachers are constantly asking for throughout the year.”

To meet these local needs, UWYC is asking the community to help with the drive and donate as they’re able by Saturday, July 30 so that students in need can receive their backpacks by the first day of classes and start the school year ready to learn.

All donations to UWYC are tax deductible and there are two main methods that community members can contribute: by giving directly to UWYC through Venmo or its website. Businesses can also request an invoice through UWYC’s website.

“If they’re a business, they can also request an invoice and we also like to tell people this is a really great opportunity to have your staff get involved in giving back to the community and being able to challenge them,” Jones added. “If you have a staff of 20 and each person just gives $12, I mean, that’s $240 right there. So it’s a really fun way to be able to encourage staff from your business or organization to also get involved.”

But most importantly, Jones explained that the reason to get involved is to support kids’ education.

“I just think it’s a really important program,” she said. “If the kids arrive equipped, ready for the school day, I also believe that it helps them feel competent in their ability to function in the classroom. Often times I think we forget these students are dealing with things at home or who knows what their home environment is. But if we can make sure that their environment at school is the best that it can be, then we’ve done our job.”

To help with the Drive for School Supplies, individuals can donate to UWYC’s Venmo under the username “@UnitedWayYuma” or directly through their website by visiting www.liveunitedyuma.org/driveforschoolsupplies.