Our mission is to secure and distribute school supplies at no cost to teachers of students in need.

Teachers across the country report spending between $500-$1,000 annually of their own money on school supplies and classroom materials. In schools with high levels of poverty, teachers easily exceed the average with little, if any, relief from cash-strapped districts. For families struggling to provide food and shelter, school supplies for their child are simply unaffordable. Without access to the most basic school supplies, students are unprepared to thrive at school. Crayons to Classrooms (C2C) helps bring relief to teachers and students' families by offering a retail-style store where teachers obtain school supplies and educational material for free. Teachers from preK-12 schools where 70% or more of students receive free/reduced meals via the National School Lunch Program are invited to shop twice per academic year. No other organization within the Greater Dayton, Ohio, region provides year-round school supplies to students and teachers most at need within our community.

For every dollar we receive in funding, we have the purchasing power to distribute $10 in school supplies. This funding would support the final expansion of our program into all 110 qualifying, low-income schools during the 2018-19 school year. By helping to ensure that every school in our area has access to free school supplies from our Teacher Resource Center, we would be able to serve approximately 38,000 students via 2,800 teacher shopping trips annually with the average shopping trip valued at $890. Since we opened our doors to 8 pilot schools in 2009, we have distributed nearly $16M in supplies through 17,000 teacher shopping trips and work tirelessly to ensure that every child has the tools they need to succeed every day, in every way.

For the most impoverished of students, education is an opportunity to change their future and, oftentimes, break generational cycles of poverty. Without a pencil to write or paper to write on, a student's ability to engage in learning is hindered creating an additional barrier to success.

As one of our teachers said, "A pencil seems like such a little thing. But, to some of our students, they don't even come with a pencil, much less any other supplies. Being able to have a pencil during class makes an immediate impact on their ability to focus and complete work."

By providing school supplies to the region's high-need students, C2C helps encourage increased student engagement in the classroom which in turn builds self-confidence. This ties into an increased opportunity for academic success and can help change the trajectory of a student's education and life.