With over 80 applicants for this year’s annual Backpack Project, Rocky Mountain Victory Church is looking for more donations to ensure families can provide their kids with the proper supplies when school resumes next month.
Every year, Victory Church, which runs the local thrift store of the same name, partners with Bow Valley Basics to help give backpacks filled with school supplies to needy children, however, the need is greater this year and organizers are asking the community for help.
“In past years we’ve just tried to get as much stuff that has been donated together as possible,” said Caleb Crawley, store manager at Victory Thrift. “Obviously, when you’re talking about 80 kids that starts to become not so feasible, but we do a number of different fundraisers each year.”
The next scheduled fundraiser is on Aug. 25 at the thrift store and it will feature a bouncy castle and games for the kids, a barbecue and live music. All proceeds will go to the Backpack Project and the Jacket Frost program, which provides jackets to children in winter.
Although this is the eighth year for the jacket program, Crawley points out that the back to school initiative has been running a little longer and came from a few local people assembling in a garage.
“Basically we started as a garage sale for this program 14 years ago,” the store manager explained. “We noticed a few families who just needed some help with supplies and stuff.
“We started out really small, with just a few kids here and there and it’s grown to include Banff and Canmore,” he continued. “It’s really grown to huge amounts in the last few years.”
The church’s partnership with Bow Valley Basics started several years ago and has also helped build the amount of donations and awareness for the program each year.
“(Bow Valley Basics) are able to help us out tremendously,” he said. “They do all of our ordering for us. We let them know how many kids we have and the basics of what we need and they put everything together for us.”
The amount of support both programs have received from other local businesses as well as the town’s FCSS has been crucial, Crawley noted, but one of the biggest contributors has always been the community.
“The community is the only reason that this is still going on,” he said. “We definitely couldn’t do it without them. I’d like to emphasize how much we appreciate the community.
“We have this vision of helping out the kids in a number of different areas with the programs we have,” he added. “None of it would happen if nobody took the initiative to help us out.”
Victory Church is still accepting donations for the Backpack Project, be it in the form of school supplies or a monetary donation with an accompanying tax receipt.
“We take donations all year round,” he said. “At the store we have a piggy bank in front of the till where customers can put in their change and 100 per cent of that goes toward either the Jacket Frost or the Backpack Program.
“It’s all not-for-profit so it all goes towards those two programs.”
