Mission: School Supply Drive

One of the greatest issues in Richmond right now are the challenges many of the children in the city face growing up. Education really becomes one of the keys to breaking cycles of neglect and poverty, giving our children a real chance at a future. Our Missional Community, located in Carver Community, recently undertook a school supply drive at Carver Elementary School. Carver is a school with an excellent principal, dedicated staff, and great kids. But with 96.5% of students participating in free and reduced lunch, its evident that many of the children are coming to school dealing with very difficult circumstances even before they step foot in the building.

Our rhythm of mission always begins with listening before acting. If our mission is uninformed by the actual issues and relevant remedies it will be ineffective. Principal Brickhouse has been gracious enough to catch up with me several times and provide me with the information I needed. Among other things, two basic data points were important: exactly what supplies were needed and how big was the school, population-wise. Principal Brickhouse was able to provide me with the list of supplies parents get for their kids. He was also to tell me that there approximately 500 students at the school, and about 40 teachers. With this information, we would knew what to get and some order of magnitude for quantity of supplies (i.e. we didn't want to get 10 scissors for 500 students).

Also crucial, we timed it so we could start buying supplies during the Back-to-School tax holiday. Not only were we able to save on taxes but the sales are also really good that weekend. The challenge was finding stores that didn't have limits on how many you could buy. Target was great for that. I presented this idea and some of the basic information to the Missional Community during one of our gatherings and everyone was immediately excited. People used it as an opportunity to get together and socialize while they shopped. In addition to the funds Commonwealth Chapel provided our community, everyone contributed their own money as well.

We collected the supplies at where we met for Missional Community (which happened to be my house) and people brought more and more each week. All the way up to the day that we dropped the supplies off, people were still bringing bags of supplies! All told we collected approximately 1800 pencils, 250 boxes of crayons, 500 notebooks, 200 bottles of glue, 100 glue sticks, 100 pens, 250 scissors, 100 rulers - I don't have exact numbers because we honestly lost count!

In addition to this, Rob Rhoden (our lead pastor who's wife is a teacher) suggested that we make goodie bags for the teachers, so we made 40 of them as well! We filled them with candy, munchies, sticky notes, hand sanitizer, and pens and enclosed them with a note expressing our appreciate for them and pledging to

pray for them this year. We took the extra candy and made a basket for the office staff (which somehow made it to the

principal's desk before we left ;-)

The week before we delivered the supplies, we gathered as a Missional

Community and prayed over the supplies. Our prayer was (and is) that these supplies and gifts would bless the students and the staff and allow them to focus more on learning. We prayed that the teachers would be encouraged, knowing that there were people out there that appreciated them, loved them, and were praying for them. Most of all, we prayed that Jesus would be glorified since He was our inspiration for doing this.

On the Friday before school started, a bunch of us from the Missional Community took our lunch hour to go by and drop everything off. Principal Brickhouse and the rest of the faculty and staff were extremely gracious and appreciative. The entire experience was made even more tangible when all of us saw some of the students that would get to use the supplies this year.

Please continue to be in prayer for Carver Elementary, that they would have a great year and that they would know that God loves them and is providing for them. I hope this story encourages other communities out there to "adopt" a school next year. My prayer is that the entire community of Christ followers next year would be able to "adopt" 30 schools, the next year - all of them. I hope that the details I provided in the post are helpful in planning your school supply drive. If you need any other help, or have ideas you'd like to share, feel free to email me.