Kids In Need Foundation

* Procure more product to feed to the Centers, getting free school supplies into the hands of an increased number of children in need

* Support the efforts of the Resource Centers by offering significant education in areas that will have a positive impact on their everyday operations.

* Increase awareness of the Kids In Need Foundation among corporate and consumer populations.

* Serve 10 million students annually by the year 2020.

In keeping with our mission to ensure that every child is prepared to learn and succeed by providing free school supplies nationally to students most in need, the Resource Center program provides free school supplies to impoverished students and underfunded teachers throughout America. To date, Kids In Need has distributed a total of more than $922 million worth of supplies to students, now supporting the classroom readiness of 5.4 million children annually. The National Network of Resource Centers consists of 40 facilities nationwide empowering teachers from qualified high-poverty schools to obtain supplies needed by their students, positively impacting millions of students, resulting in improved test scores, attendance, and classroom behavior. The most critical lasting benefit of providing school supplies to children who would otherwise do without is that these children receive a more thorough and significant education because they are able to participate more effectively in the classroom learning process, so they succeed more often in the classroom.
One of the ways we are increasing the number of students being served is to add affiliate Resource Centers to the National Network. Another method is to procure and distribute additional product to the Centers in the network so they can add qualified schools to their rosters of those they serve, which means more students receive supplies. Media outlets have contacted us for information concerning what teachers spend out of their own pockets to provide their students with supplies. To alleviate teachers of that burden is one of the original reasons the Resource Centers program was established. The thinking of the Board and Committees working to implement the strategic plan is that increasing awareness of what we do will in turn help establish us as the authority in this area. The program is promoted in local media, education publications, education websites, education blogs, mommy blogs, and broadcast emails.

The purpose/goal of the Resource Centers program is to provide free school supplies to children attending pre-K through 12th grade public, private, parochial, and charter schools in the immediate areas covered by the Resource Centers in the national network that have at least 70 percent of students enrolled in the federal free and reduced lunch program. Teachers from the designated schools are invited to shop at their local Resource Centers to obtain the school supplies needed by their students. The role of the Kids In Need Foundation is to get the school supplies to the Resource Centers to put on their shelves for the teachers to take. In addition, the three remaining programs of the Foundation, School Ready Supplies, Second Responder, and Teacher Grants provides supplies to students not currently served by the Resource Centers.

The Kids In Need Foundation was established in 1995 by the school supplies and office products industry to make a contribution to the well-being of students and teachers, their primary customers. The Foundation initially defined two programs -- Resource Centers and Teacher Grants -- as the means to fulfill its mission of providing free school supplies to kids who need them. The Foundation was headquartered in Dayton, Ohio and had two employees. Today the Foundation has offices in both Dayton and Minneaplis, MN, and has 12 employees. In 1997, the Foundation opened its first Resource Center, a free store for teachers, in Chicago. At the time, no other national non-profit organization was claiming this mission nor operating free stores for teachers.

At the end of 1999, the Foundation had opened five Resource Centers across the country, including the one in Minneapolis, and the concept of a facility set up like a retail store where teachers from low income schools could go to obtain free supplies for their students started catching on. People from all fifty states started contacting us to find out how to start a Resource Center. Finally, we wrote a detailed manual with that information and put it on our website to help grow the concept of getting free supplies to students most in need. In 2006, the Stanford Social Innovation Review of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business cited the free store for teachers concept as an innovative idea that works. Now in 2017, there are 40 Resource Centers in the Kids In Need National Network. Scores of similar facilities operate across the United States that are not part of Kids In Need, and we still get five or six inquiries about starting a Center every year.

Since 1995, the Kids In Need Foundation has met all kinds of economic challenges to continue to grow the number of donors, the amount of funds raised, and the number of children and teachers served. The most critical challenge we've faced as an organization has been building awareness. We've had difficulty being covered by national media. That changed in December of 2014 when the NBC Nightly News featured the Foundation in its broadcast. It is still not the easiest thing to get national media coverage, but our work has attracted many national media outlets now as awareness has grown about the need children from low income families have for adequate tools to succeed in the classroom.
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