Me (top row, third from left) with a few coworkers who contributed to the backpack drive.

As a kid, back-to-school season was always an exciting time. Although it signaled the end of summer freedom, it also meant reuniting with friends, getting a few new outfits and stocking up on school supplies. As the daughter of a teacher, I also got to help my mom decorate her classroom for the year. Now I’m an adult and summer vacation is just a distant memory, but that hasn’t stopped me from helping to make back-to-school season an exciting time for other kids.

For the past two years, Atlantic Southeast’s LIFT program has participated in a backpack drive for underprivileged school children coordinated by Atlanta-area charity For the Kid in All of Us. We are just one of a handful of Metro Atlanta companies that encourages employees to contribute fully-stocked backpacks to the cause. The drive typically lasts a few weeks and leads up to a community event held at Atlanta’s Piedmont Park.

The backpack drive was a pretty independent effort during our first year participating, with employees contributing their own fully-stocked backpacks. However, this year, a group of us decided to make it easier for more employees to get involved by pooling our resources. One of us would buy the paper and pens for a bag, another person would buy the notebooks and so on. We also took cash donations and bought supplies for our coworkers who couldn’t make it to the store. The result was a collective team effort that included donations from at least 75 people in our work area.

In total, Atlantic Southeast employees donated more than 70 fully-stocked backpacks to the drive, which is 20 more than we donated last year! We also landed in the No. 5 spot among Atlanta-area companies that held backpack drives….not bad considering we were up against some very large companies in the race!