The 2015 annual Cram the Van school supply campaign is impacting Santa RosaCounty’s community in a big way — $42,500. Over 2,500 Head Start through high school students received backpacks filled with many supplies needed to start school the year, including calculators, protractors, compasses, pens, pencils, flash drives, paper, notebooks, construction paper, and crayons. United Way of Santa Rosa County coordinates the drive and works with volunteers to accommodate the variety of school supply requests submitted by area schools each year.
Applications for student’s supplies were accepted from schools through Aug. 5. “Our logistics processes ensure that each student within the campaign receives a supply filled backpack. In some cases this year, we even responded to requests for special items like graphing calculators, headphones and flash drives,” said Anja Machado, marketing and special events manager.
The Cram the Van campaign for 2015 is made possible by United Way SRC and its partners: WEAR TV, Sandy Sansing, Papa Johns, Pace and Gulf Breeze Wal-Mart Locations, CatCountry, SoftRock 94.1, Magic 106.1, Nash FM 102.7, NewsTalk 1370, Jet 100.7 and United Way Escambia. Major gift donors include Gulf Breeze Sertoma Club, CharterBank, International Paper, Gulf Power, Saltmarsh, Cleaveland & Gund, Local Yokel, Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Department, and First United Methodist Church of Milton.
The annual campaign raises money and accepts donations from the community to provide students in need with backpacks and school supplies before the school year. Santa RosaCounty community helped fill three vans with over 15,000 pounds of school supplies this year. Nearly 400 volunteer hours and 250 United Way SRC staff hours were invested to collect, sort, and distribute supplies. “We’re very proud every dollar raised was spent on backpacks and school supplies to benefit our local students,” explains Machado.
The Cram the Van campaign impact to help Santa RosaCounty students increased 7 percent from 2014 to 2015.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Cram the Van filled 2,500 new backpacks