Empower Our St. Louis Youth through Education!

We all know how important education is for giving children an opportunity to succeed in life, and how under-resourced many families are in the communities that we serve. This past summer Project Downtown STL was reached out by Jennings Public School (JPS) district to see how we could help them.
Dr. McCoy, the JPS Superintendent, faces many challenges as he tries to provide a quality education to so many low-income families. His tenacity, creativity, and passion for finding ways to support these students is truly remarkable. After a long conversation about the issues that the schools are facing, Project Downtown STL committed to investing in these student’s futures.
The need that we set out to meet focused on providing school supplies to families that might otherwise struggle to afford them. Dr. McCoy told us about how many students will skip the first week or two of school to avoid the embarrassment of not being able to afford their school supplies and consequently fall behind in their classes. We want the local schools to be a place where even underprivileged children feel that they can succeed. We believe that ever child has the potential to grow into a productive, healthy, successful member of their own community—and we want to play our part in giving them the opportunity to do just that.
Practically, this looked like providing over 1,500 backpacks filled with a year’s supply of grade appropriate schools supplies to the students of the Jennings Public Schools!
Hundreds of volunteers showed up on Friday, August 3rd at the Dar-Ul-Islam gym and within 3 hours had unloaded thousands of notebooks, folders, pencils, etc. and packed 1,500 backpacks full of quality school supplies to be distributed the next morning. We are so thankful to all of our volunteers who gave away their free time on a Friday night to come out and make a difference in these families’ lives. We truly could not have done it without you.
The next morning the school district allowed us to set up a booth at their annual “JPS Back-2-School Jamboree” where we distributed each and every backpack individually to the families who needed them. It was such a joy to be able to see the children’s excitement when they got to pick out their favorite color backpack and the parent’s thankfulness when they left with all of the school supplies that they needed for the 2018-2019 school year!
We know that the struggles that these families face are not all fixed by providing a backpack for their child this year, but the look on these parent’s faces told us that, even for just a moment, they were able to see just how bright their child’s future could be; and that is what we as Project Downtown STL long to give them—hope. 

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