It is back-to-school time which means time to shop for school supplies for your children! For many local families, it isn’t as easy as running to the store for supplies, millions of American children who live in poverty don’t have that luxury.
I was introduced to the PURELL® Lend a Hand Program earlier this month. PURELL is working with Champions for Kids and Walmart to help kids in need with back to school supplies. I reached out to see if there was an interest on our facebook page and was excited to see how many of you wanted to participate in helping local kids with school supplies.
We had children as young as 4 weeks old through 10 volunteering today and making a difference at the Akron Canton Foodbank and they did a super job!
This was a sponsored post.
Kids Making a Difference at Akron Canton Foodbank
Together, we can all make a difference, even kids. That is what the Champions for Kids mission is all about, making a difference, one person at a time.
We were able to collect many back to school supplies during our PURELL Lend a Hand Project. We collected PURELL products, tissues, glue, notebooks, paper, folders, markers, pencils, colored pencils, and wipes.
If you know me, you know that I am always talking about the importance of clean hands at school. I keep PURELL hand sanitizer in my car, on my key chain, and attached to my kids’ backpacks. 80% of germs are spread by our hands, so clean hands are a must! In a recent study, classes that used PURELL hand sanitizer regularly had a 51% lower absenteeism than those that didn’t.
We decided to that the Akron Canton Foodbank was the perfect choice for our Lend a Hand Project because they assist more than 180,000 people with food and essential needs every year!
We were excited to have a tour of the foodbank warehouse and learn more about how they help those in need in our communities.
First off, the scale – thankfully only the kids got weighed in! 🙂 Our kids weighed in at 465 lbs.
The foodbank weighs all the food that comes in and out of the building.
Guess how much goes out every day! The same as our kids?
Nope, 100,000 pounds of food is shipped out everyday at the Akron Canton Foodbank! Isn’t that amazing? And today, it was 150,000 pounds!
We also learned that 1 in 4 kids in Ohio struggle with hunger. We toured the warehouse with a cardboard cutout of “Kate” who represents that one of the 80,040 kids that go hungry in our area.
“Kate” could go to school with your kids, be your neighbor, or even a relative. It is a real need, even in Akron, Ohio.
The good news is that companies and people like you and me can make a difference.
Every $1 donated equals 4 meals because of the large buying power and donations they receive.
They can pass that food onto soup kitchens, shelters, and food pantries all over the area. It was amazing to see the massive amounts of food that is donated and ready to help those in need! 
After the tour, our young kids were able to help out with the Essentials Soap program. The Akron Canton Foodbank is the only foodbank in the country to offer a soap program.
Thanks to our community’s GOJO, who makes PURELL, we have a top notch program that provides families in need with basic soaps like hand soap and shampoo. They even invented a custom distribution machine to fill the bottles with their donated soaps!
What a great Akron company!
Our young kids were able to put labels on the empty soap bottles today. We were all very impressed by their hard work and the pride they took in putting the labels on straight – not an easy task when the average age of our group was 5!
Our kids were hard at work and put labels on 1,200 bottles! See how a few can make a difference?! Even kids? Plus, we all had a great time. My 9 year old son confessed on our way home that he thought today was going to be boring but he had a great time. My daughter said, “Me too!” Finding ways to get our children involved to volunteer at a young age is a fantastic way for them to develop compassion for others and a heart of volunteering and giving.
Find out how you can help fill those bottles and more during Operation Orange, a 24 hour event for adults and kids (ages 10+) on September 5-6, 2014. If you would like to get involved with the Akron Canton Foodbank, check out their website for many ways to volunteer, donate, and more.
Even if you are not in the Akron area, you can become a Champion for Kids too by participating in your own PURELL Lend a Hand Project. No project or help is too simple or too small to make a difference.
