More Calgary families are relying on community resources to get basic school essentials for their children in the upcoming school year.
Around 300 kids and their parents lined up to receive a free backpack and school supplies from the Advocacy for Better Communities Foundation (ABC Foundation) on Thursday. The foundation is an organization that advocates for better access to the justice system, especially for newcomers and marginalized communities.
ABC Foundation CEO Richa Sharma said kids will receive a free backpack along with a 20-piece stationary pack and a snack pack. All 300 backpacks were given out within two hours and many families who couldn’t get a backpack or sign up online were asking for help, she said.
“We are glad that we had an overwhelming response,” Sharma told LiveWire on Thursday.
ABC Foundation team member Raj Dhillon said the response from community members was also overwhelming.
“We had local realtors, businesses and sponsors from our community who helped us collect over 300 backpacks and stationary packs for children to go back to school,” she said.
Across the city, parents are feeling the pinch with the rising cost of living.
Kim Anthony, interim executive director for Education Matters, said more than 25 per cent of Calgarians cannot meet basic financial needs, up from 19 per cent in 2022.
This year, the nonprofit foundation aims to raise around $150,000 for 3,000 backpacks for pre-K to Grade 12 kids across all Calgary Board of Education (CBE) schools. The average cost of a backpack – including the essentials like paper and pens – is around $50.
Anthony said each school will tell Education Matters approximately how many students will need backpacks and school supplies, and this will determine how much money is needed.
The organization also raises money for different initiatives throughout the year, such as student well-being programs and funds to help students who need help with field trip fees.
“Sometimes [schools] will need more [backpacks], and they will let us know that, too. We work with a group that is part of the CBE Partnerships Group, so they gather all that information for us and then they will let us know what we need to raise,” she told LiveWire on Friday.
“It’s a lot of families [who need help], and we have more and more families coming to Calgary. We want to make sure that every student has equal opportunities at school with no barriers, and a big one would be financial.”
Helping kids also means building better communities
Backpack drives and other fundraisers are also opportunities to help foster community belonging for school children and their families.
Sharma said it is important for the ABC Foundation to meet people in public spaces and to partner with community partners such as the Calgary Police Service which can help provide resources to community members.
“Whenever we want to gain access to the public and we want to talk to them, it’s very easy to talk to them in spaces where they come out smiling, and with the schools opening we decided to hold the backpack drive,” she said.
Anthony said each school has unique needs, and it’s important for kids to feel like they belong to the school community.
She said a family’s financial standing really affects their children’s learning and participation in school, as well as how they interact with their peers and educators.
“You want them to have a positive experience going through school and feeling like they belong, and there’s somewhere safe to be and that they have everything they need to succeed. That’s why the backpacks are so good because you don’t want kids to feel like they don’t have what others have or that they don’t have what they need to get through their day at school,” Anthony said.
