Families in need in Huntsville-Madison County can receive assistance for the upcoming school year with help from an annual school supply giveaway set to take place on Saturday, July 13.
Community Awareness for Youth (CAFY) is an organization managed by the Rocket City’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The organization focuses on four pillars: health, education, careers and finance.
Kenny Anderson, Huntsville’s director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), said the giveaway helps set families up for success.
“The big focus is on something that's critical to the core of children and youth, and that's education. And to the extent that we can provide families with good, solid, grounded information about the resources that they can have access to, many of these things are free resources or low-cost resources, we know that we can provide them with a measure of success and a great structure to achieve success,” Anderson said.
He explained CAFY has a goal of setting students up for lifelong success, which the school supply giveaway helps with that.
“We know kids are going to go to start school. Maybe they're preschoolers, and they'll go on into elementary education, and then on and on and on. What are things along the way that we can ensure that they're successful,” Anderson explained. “So, how do we provide opportunities for them to at some point be able to be financially literate? How do we find opportunities at some point for them to be interested in investing in a healthy lifestyle for their living? How do we provide opportunities for them to pursue career opportunities in STEM and other things that can provide great careers for them once they reach the point of graduating from high school and going to college?”
Anderson said the school supply giveaway event is not to provide families with an entire school years’ worth of supplies, but rather to ensure they have what they need to begin the new academic year to take financial pressures off families and educators alike.
“We're not trying to equip students for the whole school year, or even for the whole school quarter or first semester. We're simply saying to them that we know it takes a little something to get things started,” Anderson said. “We know that sometimes there are families that are challenged in terms of being able to provide for their families at the beginning of the school year. We know that increasingly, teachers have the responsibility and burden sometimes to be able to provide extra supplies to students, or to be confronted by students who may not have the economic means to be able to get all that they need. So, we provide the little something at the very front end.”
In addition to the school supplies, families can also receive a week’s worth of groceries at the event. One Generation Away is a nonprofit founded in 2013 that provides food for families in need. The organization takes food from grocery stores, farms, restaurants and caterers and redistributes the items to families experiencing food insecurity.
“Refuge Church is the sponsor of that particular activity, and so Refuge Church will recruit 50 to 75 or more volunteers to come out, unload the pallets, organize the food distribution process, and then we'll have a drive through, set up so that people can come through,” Anderson said.
DEI has been a hot topic issue in governmental legislation including here in Alabama. Earlier this year, Gov. Kay signed Senate Bill 129, which prohibits the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public schools, universities and state agencies.
Anderson said DEI is more than racial diversity and it encompasses other values as well.
“We’re not just talking about diversity of race and ethnicity. That's not the only value that we look at, but we talk about the value of learning from people who may have a disability or learning from people who may have a different gender identity, or learning from people who have a different socioeconomic status or come from a different part of the country or a different part of the world,” he said.
Anderson said school-aged children benefit from DEI because the differences between students allows them to learn from each other.
“Children who are different can learn from other children, who are different from them. They can learn things about common humanity, but they can also leverage the differences that we bring to the table as assets,” Anderson explained. “So, if I'm a young child in school who doesn't have a certain skill that another child has, and we're working together as a team or as partners collaboratively, I can learn and I can grow as a consequence of that. Because that person came into that space with something that I did not have,”
The CAFY Back-to-School Giveaway is Saturday, July 13 at Calhoun Community College from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. There is a two backpack of school supply limit for all families. For more information on this event, visit the CAFY Facebook page.
