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It’s no secret that the best days of school are the first and the last day of school, while every day in-between depends on how much homework your teachers assign, or the difficulty of the tests given. While it’s been years since I’ve experienced the first day of school, the excitement of gathering my freshly sharpened pencils and shiny notebooks remains as clear in my mind as the route to my high school locker.
As the new Community Impact and Internal Programs Coordinator at the United Way of Southwest Minnesota, I had the pleasure of stepping back in time and reliving those days with our Stuff the Bus initiative. Every summer, UWSWMN collects school supplies at various locations to donate to school districts in our service area. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when I began my journey to pick up the collection bins but the outpouring of support from Southwest Minnesota was tremendous.
My first stop was Avera where I hoped to find a full bin. They turned that hope into absolute amazement when I was greeted with an overflowing tiered cart that had me doing a little dance in the hospital atrium. I said, “I’ll need to bring my car up front” to my contact because there were bins, bags and boxes full of notebooks, pens, glue sticks and more that were going back to the office to be counted and sorted.
This went on for three days as I traveled throughout our service area and picked up school supplies at 43 locations. I was filled with gratitude at the generosity of our community and how they “raised their hands” to support local students and teachers. And to be honest, I was a little overwhelmed with the prospect of distributing all those donated items too. Even though I shouldn’t have been, as the community stepped up once again and answered our call for volunteers.
We had more than 30 volunteers help the United Way of Southwest Minnesota distribute 48,000 school supplies this year. Volunteers counted and sorted donated items, lifted countless heavy boxes to set-up the Merit Center for the event, “shopped” supplies for individual schools, and loaded the vehicles of grateful teachers and administrators from 23 schools.
This was truly a community supported event that will directly benefit 4000 area students. All the supplies are now in the hands of the schools, so please contact your school directly if your child needs some school supplies for the upcoming year.
I hope every student this year has a moment before the reality of homework and tests sets in, where they happily collect all their school supplies and eagerly anticipate all the fun (and learning) of the first day of school. Please know – Southwest Minnesota – that you played a role in giving them that special moment and the comfort of having the supplies they need to succeed in the 2025-26 school year. On their behalf, the United Way of Southwest Minnesota thanks you for making a difference.
Tanya Moat
Community Impact and Internal Programs Coordinator
United Way of Southwest Minnesota