Backpacks for Needy Students Next School Year

Orson Picart

The academic year comes to an end later this month and while students will be on summer vacation, preparations are already underway for the beginning of the new school year.  An initiative led by media personality Orson Picart to provide as many as three hundred backpacks is getting off the ground and he is turning to you to assist with making it possible. Picart is seeking to procure a shipment of school bags which he intends to distribute across Belize City sometime in August, just ahead of the reopening of schools. He stopped by today to share more details on the ongoing effort.

Orson Picart, Organizer, Back 2 School Backpack Drive

“The Back-to-School Backpack Drive was birthed out of a need to expand a social program that myself and several of my colleagues have embarked over the last couple of months.  And so we know that we are living in financially tough times exacerbated by last year’s onset of the global pandemic and all that comes along with that.  Those of us who can assist are the ones who should be tasked with helping the least fortunate in our communities, our vulnerable communities.  And so with that, I’ve decided to put together this back-to-school backpack drive early so that we can get some assistance for students who come from single-parent households on the south side of Belize City.  We are aiming for three hundred backpacks and I have identified a company in the United States that does sale of backpacks in bulks and so we are trying to raise a certain amount of money from local and international donors so that we can then procure the bags, have them shipped to Belize and then distribute it sometime in the month of August, early August in preparation or in anticipation of the next school year. We have two ways that we go about identifying potential recipients.  We will be using school principals and so we have that resource at our hands from building relationships through the media with principals over the years.  So they will help us identify some of their students and as well what we will be doing is that we have done some of the groundwork already in terms of going into different communities on south side Belize and identifying single-parent households and the need that they have, in terms of how many children in this particular household are going to school, so that’s another way we have been doing that assessment already.”