40. Community Need The mission of Crayons to Classrooms (C2C) is to provide and distribute school supplies at no cost to teachers of students in need within the Greater Dayton area. Our vision is to ensure every student in need has the tools for success everyday, in every way.
Our mission is accomplished through our Teacher Resource Center which helps ensure every student in need has the tools to succeed every day, in every way. Since teachers are the ones purchasing school supplies for children in low-income communities, C2C directly assists qualified teachers in stocking their classrooms with the materials and resources required to achieve academic success. Access to free school supplies is critical to ensuring a positive and productive learning environment; C2C aims to curate these spaces for pre-k through 12th grade students in every school it serves. The Teacher Resource Center is located in southeast Dayton, central to the counties it serves: Clark, Darke, Greene, Miami, Montgomery, Preble, and Warren counties.
Our list of eligible schools is inclusive of those within our service area where 60% or more of the student population is enrolled in free or reduced lunch programming via the National School Lunch Program. In Preble County, Federal Poverty Level guidelines designate a family of 4 at 130% of poverty rate. Approximately 83% of the students we serve are identified as low-income.
Our vision has always been to ensure every student in need has the tools for success everyday. Our intention in our upcoming strategic planning process is to leverage our expertise and partnerships to expand and serve even more students and teachers in need in our region.
What’s keeping our organization from achieving this vision is currently the lack of warehouse space. In 2021, the 7,000 square foot warehouse facility that was previously donated to us was leased to a new business and, thus, became unavailable to us. As we had no place to move them, nearly $586,000 worth of supplies that had been in storage there either had to be donated to other centers and nonprofits or, tragically, even recycled or destroyed if we could find no other home for the product in a pinch.
Since that time, we have had to refuse a significant amount of product donations that could have been distributed to our community as we do not have space to store it. Between June and August of 2022 alone, we have had to turn away over $1.2M worth of donations that included disinfectant wipes, craft supplies, pens, pencils, erasers and educational supplies, all that teachers would have gratefully accepted for use in their classrooms.
Further exacerbating the problem, in recent years, we have significantly increased the variety of items we procure and stock in our Teacher Resource Center. We are stocking many additional special items that students need to be successful in the classroom – personal hygiene products such as socks, underwear and menstrual hygiene products, social emotional learning tools to support mental health in the classroom, financial literacy learning aids and much more.
Our national affiliate, the Kids in Need Foundation (KINF), through whom we have received an annual average of $2.4M in essential supplies in recent years, has a strategic goal to increase their product distributions to centers like ours by 600% over the next 5 years, making it even more imperative that we find warehouse space in the immediate future to enable us to accept increased distributions.
Warehouse space in the Greater Dayton area is at a premium and, after searching for nearly a year and a half, we find it unlikely that we will secure donated warehouse space in the current market.
By the end of the three-year warehouse expansion project, we will consider the project a success when we have seen an increase of 30% of growth in distributions of essential school supplies to eligible schools.