Church World Service (CWS) School Kit Donations A Huge Success!

A few months ago the Church World Service teamed up with local students to provide refugee children with school kits. These school kits came in reusable canvas bags and were filled with crucial school supplies like notebooks, pens, pencils and crayons. For many students, the supplies in these kits may seem accessible and easy to afford but for children of newly arrived refugee families these kits make a world of difference. Church World Service (CWS) helped to organize students and encourage the donation of 275 kits and then passed the supplies onto us at CRIS. We were then able to distribute these kits to many refugee children who were very excited to receive the brand new supplies.We recently followed up with Kashi Adhikari, who works at a local Nepali community center that received a number of kits, and he talked about the great success of these supplies. Adhikari told us that children who received the donations were ecstatic about the kits and the presence of new supplies greatly increased their enthusiasm for school and education. He said that before the kits, going to school could be difficult for many refugee children but the new supplies really helped alleviate the resistance for these refugee students to go to school. For Adhikari and the other members of the community center the overall experience with the kits was wonderful and they remarked that they would love to be a part of another program like that in the future. This is an example of how great of an impact these donations have on our local refugee community and the role that everyone can have in helping refugees work adjust to their lives in the Columbus community. We hope that this success story can be an encouragement for local citizens to continue the great work they are doing.