Thank you!
Thank you to all of our corporate, church, non-profit and individual partners who all pulled together to donate more than 800 backpacks as well as school supplies for the families YSM serves.
What a community effort! A big thank you to all of our partners whose generosity will help struggling parents ensure their children have all the supplies they need to start a new school year:
- Bags without Barriers
- BMO
- Bond Brand Loyalty
- Cornerstone Church
- Elevation Church
- Goodmans
- Humaniti
- Impact Church
- Patricia’s Angels
- The People’s Church PREMIX junior youth
- St. Paul’s Bloor Street
- The Stone Church
- TD
- And 5 kind-hearted individual donors!
This summer we welcomed two special volunteer groups to fill the donated backpacks with supplies and personal notes of encouragement. Thanks to Bank of Montreal Financial Group (BMO) and to The People’s Church’s PREMIX junior high youth group and their leaders for all their hard work!
As PREMIX’s 13- and 14-year-old members were hard at work packing backpacks, one teenager reflected, “I think this is important because it spreads joy and kindness, and gives people hope.”
Another girl imagined the child who would receive the backpack she was packing, and said, “I hope they feel like they’re not alone, and that someone is always going to be with them. That they’ll just feel happy and not have to worry about financial stuff, or stuff that at that age they’re not supposed to think about.” Her friend agreed: “I want a child to feel happy and relieved not to think about finances — so they get to have fun at school.”
This story originally appeared in the fall 2025 issue of YSM’s quarterly newsletter Urban Lights.
