PHILADELPHIA –
To ensure Philadelphia-area students start the school year with new pencils, calculators, backpacks and other items, Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support hosted the second annual Fill-A-Backpack drive. School supply items donated by employees from DLA Troop Support, DLA Information Operations, and DLA Contracting Services Office donated the school supply items that were delivered to the local charity Cradles to Crayons for distribution to area schools.
DLA Troop Support’s Innovative Success and Partnership in Reaching Excellence mentoring program sponsored the drive, which ran from July 17 to Aug. 24.
“The generosity of the employees is beyond impressive,” said Organizational Development Division Chief and InSPIRE creator, Joanne Anello. “It is such a rewarding feeling to help a child to start the school year with a backpack filled with important supplies. We were so thankful for the donations.”
This year’s drive surpassed the original goal of items to be collected.
“We had a goal of collecting 2,700 school supplies and we weren’t sure if we were going to meet that.” Anello added. “But then the DLA Contracting Services Office reached out in the final week and said they had about 10 boxes of supplies they collected to drop off. With that, we surpassed the goal and collected 2,750 items!”
In just the past two years, InSPIRE has collected approximately 4,000 items for local school children.
InSPIRE participants also serve as volunteers to collect and sort all the items donated.
“The amount of donations from our DLA Philadelphia colleagues is overwhelming,” said Michael Tuttle, program analyst and InSPIRE program assistant. “And we’re especially thankful for the volunteers from the InSPIRE program who took the time to sort through and count all the donations … or else we’d still be counting them!”
InSPIRE gives DLA Troop Support opportunities to give back, as the muti-faceted program also features mentoring, professional development and community service. Starting in the former Industrial Hardware supply chain in 2017, the program grew to include participants from all supply chains, staff offices, and other DLA entities, from interns to senior leaders.
If you are a DLA employee interested in being a mentor, mentee, please enroll using the following link by Sept. 29 DLA: InSPIRE Program Enrollment. For more information, or questions about InSPIRE, contact program manager Joanne Anello via email at joanne.anello@dla.mil.