Remember the smell of fresh new crayons?
Do you remember the night before your first day of school back in elementary school? You would get all of your school supplies together and ready to show off to your classmates?
New marble notebooks, your favorite colored folders... freshly sharpened number 2 pencils, and if you were really lucky, the 64 pack of Crayola crayons... you know, the ones with the sharpener on the back. What a treat that was!
Well, in a typical year, approximately 1.5 million homeless children walk into school unprepared. They are not comparing superhero lunch boxes or writing their spelling words in a fresh new notebook. They are walking in to school unprepared, hungry, embarrassed, and practically set up for failure.
Doesn't that break your heart? Well, it did mine. So I decided to do something about it.
It is AMAZING how POWERFUL social media is. ESPECIALLY when you are asking for help, for the sake of others. I decided that I wanted to help as many children as I could, have the ability to walk into their first day of school with their shoulders held a little higher... with a little more confidence, and with them KNOWING that they are so damn important, JUST as important as the other kids in their classes. Well, with a simple ask... the Amazon boxes, Staples boxes, packages from Walmart and Target... they started flooding in... and items were being left on my doorstep by the THOUSANDS.
For weeks, every night, my kids would stay up late with me.. ripping boxes open, filling pencil cases, separating grade level workbooks, and sorting backpacks... Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected that a simple ask would turn into providing OVER 500 children COMPLETELY overflowing backpacks valued at over $15,000, filled with SO many of the things they not only need, but would make them smile because there was a good chance it was also something they would want... something completely unexpected.
I made friends with some of the leadership at a Brooklyn, NY elementary school.. and on one September morning, hired a truck to pick up and bring all of our donated supplies into Brooklyn where I was blessed to be able to hand out every single backpack....
OHHHH the smiles. The thanks. The tears. The stories... PROJET REMIX was now born.. and it was only the beginning....
I will let the photos speak for themselves...