Local Mom is on a Mission to Outfit Homeless Children With School Supplies

Each year, Lynda Hall and her children bring smiles to the faces of numerous kids throughout the county who are in need, by supplying something that so many people never even think twice about—a backpack filled with school supplies.

For the past eight years, Hall and her family have delivered backpacks, filled with basic school supplies, like binders, paper and pens, to the Santa Cruz Homeless Shelter, Walnut Street Women and Children’s Shelter and the Mountain Resource Center for distribution to the many homeless kids in the county.

The idea was the brainchild of Hall’s children, who decided they wanted to donate their old backpacks before getting new ones for school. The children, who were 10, 11 and 12 at the time, asked their mother if they could also fill up the backpacks with supplies. And that was the beginning of the Lynda and Kidz Backpack Project.

What started out as two donated backpacks has grown steadily through the years. Last year the family was able to fill and donate 170 backpacks, and they are shooting for 200 this year.

“It’s so strange to see this going from just a little thing I did with my kids to where it is now,” Hall said. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”

Hall said that over the years she would reach out to friends, family and co-workers to ask for donations. Those people would then reach out to their friends, and it just continued to snowball from there.

“I have people that other people have forwarded the information to and I only have their email address and name and have never met them in person, but they donate each year,” Hall said.

The Backpack Project is especially important to Hall and her family, because she says they can relate. Hall says there was a time when her family struggled financially, and things like school supplies were a hardship to purchase.

“My kids know what it’s like,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of money for a while, so they know what it’s like to not get a new backpack each year and me getting the list from teachers thinking, ‘OK, what do you absolutely have to have right now.’”

It is because of their experiences that Hall and her children, who are now 18, 19 and 20, along with a foster son who is 22, are so passionate about keeping the project going.

“The kids absolutely love it,” Hall said. “Every year when the time gets close, they call to find out when we are doing the backpacks.”

And it is the Hall children who still to this day do all of the deliveries of the backpacks. Though they never meet the children, they hear stories about how happy the new backpacks make them.

“When you were a kid, putting your backpack and binder together was just the best thing,” Hall said. “So for a few hours when they get their backpacks they don’t have to think about why they are at a [shelter]; they are just thinking about their new stuff.”

Lynda and Kidz Backpack Project will be at Skypark on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. They will collect gently used backpacks or $35 donations to sponsor a fully-stocked backpack. For more information on the project, visit lynda-kidz-backpack-project.info/.