Here at greenLockers we are very grateful for the schools we partner with. It is an empowering experience to see the student organizations in each school take hold of the greenLockers program and make it their own. I had the opportunity to work in a few schools with the students to help collect and sort the supplies. Many young people came out to help and truly demonstrated great leadership and maturity. We decided to designate certain areas for different school items and let the students take their own greenLockers tub and sort the items. A few students stepped up and took leadership deciding where to put which items and, we allowed them to make the decision on the quality of the item donated. I asked a few students how they liked helping and the most common response was how they knew for certain they were making a difference in the local community and that was pretty cool to them. A few students had helped out in previous years and came out again showing sincerity in their time and how important the project was to them. Thanks again to all the students, adult volunteers, and schools that helped out in this year’s greenLockers drive. You are making a difference in the lives of countless children and are helping to secure a brighter future.
greenLockers has had a great amount of success this school year thanks to 34 different schools donating in our local area. Everything from backpacks, binders, and lunch boxes to sweat shirts, shoes, and textbooks has been collected and sorted through. We have spent countless hours to make sure that children locally, nationally, and across the world will have a better start to life by having the clothing and school supplies they need to be successful and fully equipped. These 34 different schools should be very proud at the work they have done. With their help we have collected over 16,000 pounds of supplies to redistribute to others. What a tremendous job! Friday June 25 is the start of distribution days. Non profits can register on the website, greenlockers.org, then start arriving at the warehouse at 9:00 am. Distribution ends at 3:00pm and will continue Saturday June 26 with the same hours of 9:00 am to 3:00pm. Thanks to everyone who has helped by donating, sorting, and collecting. You are helping to change the future of countless children.
A great thanks to Bethel College in all their efforts in assisting greenLockers in both donating and collecting new and slightly used school supplies. There was a tremendous amount of items this year, more than doubling last years number. After three different days of collections we filled around 82 bins full of supplies and clothing. Outstanding! We really got the truck full during pick up. To see more images check out our Photobucket.
My name is Adam Weaver, I am now a senior Business Administration Major, Marketing Minor, here at Bethel College. I have to wonderful oppurtunity to work along side founder Ted Bryant at greenLockers, as his intern. This internship is allowing me the chance to practice my marketing skills, and help out countless of families and children locally, nationaly, and across the world. I am doing this internship free of charge, and couldn’t be more excited about it. The life lessons and business skills, along with the chance to make a difference in the lives of others is worth every minute I put into greenLockers. I look forward to my internship with greenLockers, as well as the future of all those lives we touch.
Wow – what a year it was last year, and I know I have a post just a few down giving some of the details of the year, but I thought a video recap would be nice. It all started with the county-wide effort to get as many old recycling bins as possible. These 1300 containers were all washed by hand by the Granger Student Ministries missions group from Granger Community Church - THANK YOU!!! We put decals on all of them, and then it was off to the 17 schools (including one in New York) to collect the materials. Over 9000lbs of sorted supplies were gathered and organized for distribution at our warehouse. We partnered with over 30 local non-profit agencies to distribute the supplies to students in need, with some remaining supplies going to India, Mexico, and Columbia. NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE HELP OF MANY VOLUNTEERS, and if you are one of the many that helped out with greenLockers in 2009 – please accept my deepest gratitude for your efforts. Enjoy the video and check out the “get involved link” to find out how you can be a part of the project this year!!
We are now available to be in schools from Elementary schools through college – check out How It Works section on the bottom of the home pageand please email meif you would like your school to be a part of the project – looking forward to partnering with you in 2010.
I just wanted to share with everyone that we recieved news a few nights ago that greenLockers materials have made it down to a village just south of Bogota, Columbia. I am posting the email:
“I [the author of the email] went down with one other person and we lived in Los Altos de la Florida, Colombia (just south of Bogota). The community is mostly internally displaced people and most people have been living there for 10-18 years. Even though they are very close to Bogota (that has 8 million+ people) they do not have running water, sewer system, or a good education system. Some are able to go to school but most do not.
During our stay, we each lived with a family and taught every morning in the “library” (which also doubled as a garage for a community truck). We organized 70 children from a few hours every morning and they ranged from 1 year to 14 years old. The picture of the Christmas tree is filled with ornaments we made one day. They wrote lots of letters, made Christmas drawings, copied the alphabet & numbers, and did a few math problems. It was a wonderful experience and I am yearning to go back and teach! The picture of the three adults is myself, Ross (whom I traveled with) and Norma. Norma founded Coda a Coda and helped set up our stay in the community. Thank you so much for everything you do and all the school supplies greenLockers collected—it is much needed! The kids loved it!!”
Here are some pictures
Here are some of the kids that received greenLockers supplies singing Jingle Bells – they sound GREAT!!!
This is great!! I LOVE getting stories like this – keep them coming in!
Equipping students. . . moving the world forward. . . .
The joys of not ever knowing how something will turn out is always nerve racking for me, but also knowing that God is always working with you and being on your side is the best feeling of all time! The distribution day was yet very helpful to me to understand what it is like to run a business by yourself. I had a great experience being able to communicate with local organizations, give a helping hand with moving supplies to the vehicles, and got the opportunity to get interviewed by ABC news. I would like to share a personal story that touched my heart while I was working. A young lady Amanda Green from Volinia Outcome School came and the first thing she started to do was tear up when I explained the warehouse tour to her. Her story with the school is kids whose parents are in jail or getting ready to appear in court and the kids are in trouble also and no one to teach them. There is about 75 kids that go to this dirt road, 1 school hallway with only 5 teachers. She said that last year they all had no supplies and the 5 teachers had to use their pocket money to supply all them. Wow how hard, especially when they don’t make a lot of money anyways for teaching. She was so happy and thankful to hear about greenLockers and how much of a blessing it was for her to be here. She was also pregnant and suffering in the heat at the warehouse. I kindly helped her out finding her folders, notebooks, and getting ALL the loose leaf paper together for her in the boxes while she went through the novels. God did such a breath taking moment for me and I just realized how amazing this young pregnant lady was for loving her job even through it’s with kids that don’t ever was to learn or be at school. She has been there 6 years and never wasn’t to leave she claims. I helped her put all the boxes into her car and gave her a big hug and told her how great of a person she was. When she took off all I could say out loud was “God you are so awesome and amazing”! I honestly said it about 6-7 times around the warehouse.
Well it goes a little like this: A CrazySummer for an Internship!!
Top 10 internship moments-
My very crazy schedule that I had to deal with:
*From having a job, coaching two weeks of overnight soccer camps and four weeks of day camps, five weddings, taking a may term class, preparing for soccer season, SALT retreat, family vacation, family member passing away, and finally trying to find time to relax and be with friends.
My laptop crashing during my May term class. I had to give my final presentation and it was wiped out after hours spending on it. Having a good chunk of my internship work on it also. The journal that I had about seven-eight pages of work done. Luckily I was able to recover it all after having to get a new hard drive. What a Blessing!
Being able to hear from organizations that came to our two distribution days. Being able to hear some really amazing stories about their organization or how this was the best thing that anyone has ever done to help people. Especially during these economic crises we are in.
Being able to work with Ted and listen to and hear his views on different things besides myself. The man has such great advice for me.
Being able to get firsthand experience on leading different opportunities without Ted being with me. I was able to do the distribution day, a 5-star day, and speak and get the bins ready to go at Holy Family, Bethany Christian, and John Young schools.
Learned more of a proper way to speak when dealing with age groups. I dealt with middle school kids and then adults
I was able to understand more on expenses and how they become a huge part when you are starting out an organization or business. We were fortunate to have big things donated to us this year.
Gained- *An experience on communicating with many different area schools, organizations, and news casters.
*A good perspective on the marketing side of greenLockers.
Learned- *How to make all different types of excel spreadsheets, word documents, and blog posts.
*How to design map layouts of the warehouse for distribution day
*How to make a media alert and newsletter
*How to take the role of managing and being in charge of an organization/company. This is a good way to understand how much time is put into things.
9. Being able to allow God to work through me and give me the strength and ability to finish the work when at times I was stressed out with so much to do outside of this internship.
10. Having all of my internship work all over the house and my mom always trying to tell me to pick it up and put it in my room. I think I had internship work in almost every room in my house.
I (Lindsey Hyduk-intern for Ted) was able to take charge by myself with a local Catholic grade school in South Bend this past school year and this was Holy Family. Here is exactly what only one school can do for greenLockers: Holy Familydonated almost anything you could think of and even the teachers donated things of theirs that they didn’t need any more like helping aids for the children. I worked with Debbie and she was so great and helpful to this pick up service I did today and she told me that they would love to keep up the donating process for the future and that was so encouraging to hear!!! Holy Family was a big success to our “distribution day” and to hear from Debbie that the children were so involved in the donating process was such an amazing blessing from God. To be able to hear that you’re whole school to effect into this process with joy and fun is great. I would like to personally thank Debbie for such a great effort that she put into our locker clean our days! After I was able to get everything into my car, which was FULLY LOADED!!! The final stop was to the warehouse to drop the bins off.
So, we are having our Last Distribution Days tomorrow, Friday (July, 10th) and Saturday (July 11th), from 9am-2pm on both days. We are really hoping benefit our community – which has really been hit hard this year. Access to supplies is on a FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE basis.
If you are a charitable organization that could use school supplies and/or clothes – please feel free to fill out awishlist application form. Once you fill that out, we can fill you in with more information about getting your supplies.
Just a few pictures
These are the signs that people can follow from County Road 6 – to find the warehouse. Standing near the sign are some great individuals, representing their respective charitable organizations, who came to the first distribution days! I was so excited to meet so many wonderful people that give their lives to serve our community!
She is getting some great supplies for summer camps. By the way, these are the boxes that I have that you can fill for FREE – with whatever supplies you want to get
This is a package of donations from Long Island, NY. . . that’s right – New York!
I am so excited to see what happens in the next few days – I hope that maybe I will be able to meet you, and hear about your organization. If you don’t have an organization, but would still like to get involved with greenLockers – clickHERE to find out how.
First of all, let me apologize for not keeping the website updated as we progressed through this year’s campaign. We are going to be uploading a series of posts throughout the next few weeks entitled, “Stories from 2009″ - that will catch you up on all the highlights, videos, and pictures from this year.
The good news is that we were busier than ever (i.e., part of the reason the web updates have been slow) - collecting around 9000 lbs of usable supplies!! I can’t wait to see how much positive change we can bring to our local and global community through these supplies!!
Here is a picture of around 20 bins full of supplies from just one school. . . just part of the over 300 bins collected this year.
We have since sorted through everything, and it is now time to distribute those supplies to local charities. The distribution days are happening this Friday (19th) and Saturday (20th) between 9am-2pm. All distribution is on a FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE basis – hope to see you there!! Here is the Media alert sent out this week to the local media outlets:
greenLockers to distribute new and slightly used school supplies
and clothes to local charities for FREE
WHAT:
The new and slightly used school supplies, clothes and workbooks collected this year by greenLockers will be available for distribution to local charities. The collection of supplies from 17 local school’s “locker clean-out days” totals nearly 9,000 pounds and has already been sorted and organized based on quality and function. All supplies are FREE for those charitable organizations that come to the distribution days after filling out an application at the Web site www.greenlockers.org under the “wishlist application tab.” Supplies will ONLY be given to individuals representing charitable organizations. Distribution of the supplies will occur on a first come/first serve basis.
WHY:
There is tremendous need right now in our area on many levels and too often that may result in community organizations being under resourced. These distribution days provide an opportunity for local charities, who already are connected with the needs in our community, to get some basic materials for FREE.
WHEN: Friday June 19 and Saturday, June 20, from 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
WHERE:
Our warehouse located at 2600 Marina Drive in Elkhart, Indiana – just West of the intersection of CR6 and CR 15.
WHO:
greenLockers is a non-profit organization that was founded by Dr. Ted Bryant in the Spring of 2006. greenLockers resources students locally, nationally, and internationally through the distribution of school supplies. New and slightly-used school supplies (and clothes) are collected from area schools during their year-end locker clean-out days. In this way, greenLockers not only facilitates education, but it also enables students to help build community, gain courage, and break out of cycles of poverty that they may have been stuck in for generations.
