About Us!

Annual Backpack Drive Details

Connecting for Education will be hosting its Fourth Annual Backpack Drive this summer. Our team was motivated, in April 2021, to found this organization and start this project after one of our founders heard firsthand about how a close friend’s family—a single mother and her two elementary school-aged children—was struggling to pay bills after the mother lost her job as a result of the pandemic.

Families in such situations are often forced to make the choice between investing in education and the purchase of basic necessities. Given the impact that education, especially early education, has on later development, we at Connecting for Education believe that this shouldn't be a choice that families have to make. And although we started this project to help out families most impacted by the pandemic, our goal now is to make sure that financial reasons of any kind are not holding any students back from doing the best that they can at school.

With our backpack drive this year, our team of twelve hopes to collect and put together 400 backpacks for students in grades K-5, which will hopefully help 300-400 families within the local community ensure that their students are equipped with the resources they need for success both inside the classroom and at home. In addition to giving families peace of mind, we believe that having new supplies and a new backpack when heading back to school this fall will have a positive psychological effect on the students, boosting confidence–even if just by a tiny bit.

To ensure that backpacks go to the families who need them the most, Connecting for Education has already established an agreement with the City of Fremont's Family Resource Center, which will help distribute backpacks based on a pre-identified list of families. We also work directly with over a dozen local elementary schools, across five cities, to extend our scope of impact and ensure that we are able to effectively reach our wider community.