By Kristine Cohn
At the Kids In Need Foundation (KINF), our mission is to help students learn and succeed by providing school supplies to kids who need them most nationwide. We are so thankful to be working with Voyager Sopris Learning for a third year!
As the senior director of Development and Corporate Partnerships, I have the opportunity to work with Voyager Sopris Learning™ and other companies who want to change lives through the gift of school supplies. Many of the boys and girls we help have never received anything new in their lives, so getting a backpack filled with brand-new supplies is that much more exciting. Apart from the backpacks we distribute, KINF maintains 34 resource centers around the country, where teachers can go to get new notebooks, folders, and whatever other supplies their students need.
We also help kids by serving as Second Responder® following a natural disaster. We come in after the immediate needs of the community have been met, and we provide school supplies to students who might have lost nearly everything in a disaster such as a tornado or flood.
Last week, in Oklahoma City, Voyager Sopris Learning was one of our corporate sponsors as we donated 610 backpacks filled with supplies to the students of Southgate-Rippetoe Elementary School in Moore, Oklahoma. Those students are recovering from a devastating tornado in March of this year and are currently attending school at a church in Oklahoma City.
Since much of their school was destroyed by the tornado, these students were left without backpacks and other school supplies. Imagine their delight when we, with the help of representatives from Voyager Sopris Learning, surprised all 610 students with backpacks filled with paper, pencils, notebooks, crayons, and other necessities. It was a beautiful spring day, and the surprise was outside. The students came outside for what they thought was an assembly, only to be astonished by stacks of backpacks! It was a true joy to see the looks on their faces.
It melts our hearts to hear children say things like, “You know, this helps make my life normal again.”
We provided more than 4 million students with more than $100 million in school supplies in 2014. We cannot do it without help from sponsors like Voyager Sopris Learning … and people like you!
To learn more about Kids In Need Foundation or how you can help, please visit us at http://www.kinf.org or https://www.facebook.com/kidsinneed. KINF also sponsors two Teacher Grant programs, which award preK–12 educators with funding to provide innovative learning experiences for students.
Keep an eye out for the Voyager Sopris Learning annual back-to-school promotion, which raises funds for KINF Second Responder program by donating a portion of web store sales from August through October. Voyager Sopris Learning’s partnership with KINF has produced nearly $40,000 in cash donations from its 2013 and 2014 Back to School campaigns.
For the past six years, Kristine Cohn has fulfilled her dream as an educator, former classroom teacher, and Regional Secretary for the U.S. Department of Education by joining the Kids In Need Foundation as their Senior Director of Development and Corporate Partnerships. She is leading the charge to acquire core school supplies and grants for teachers and their students across the country. As the Kids In Need Foundation tagline says, "School Supplies--Changing Lives!" Kris and her husband, Stuart, have six adult children and 18 grandchildren in addition to two rescue dogs: Jake, a Golden Retriever, and Cooper, a GoldenDoodle.
The Kids In Need Foundation is a national 501(c)(3) charitable organization founded in 1995. Kids In Need has earned the Gold GuideStar Exchange Seal, demonstrating its commitment to transparency, and has been given a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, indicating that it operates in a fiscally responsible way and outperforms most other charities in America. For more information, visit www.kinf.org. Join Kids In Need Foundation on Twitter at twitter.com/kidsinneed and Facebook at facebook.com/kidsinneed.
