Noah's Kindness Project: The Crayon Initiative

Last year, the boys' school community was VERY supportive of them and our family.  They helped to organize a diaper drive and it was wildly successful, collecting almost 1,000 diapers for Maggie's Place.

This year, we hoped to continue the tradition of collaborating with their school and we have selected the cause of The Crayon Initiative as our cause of choice.  The boys have been working hard to put together a PowerPoint, a donation box and a posterboard to share with their school this week.

 

And while they work to organize the collection at school, we invite you to participate too!

How many of you have old, broken colors sitting in a box, a bag or maybe just laying at the bottom of some closet?

 Please tell me our house isn't the only one.  If you are like us, usually once a year, we'll sort through the old colors, pull out the ones we can save, and then we toss the rest.

They estimate each year more than 75,000 pounds of crayons end up in the trash.

I know, isn't 75,000 pounds of crayons a lot?  That's what I though too.  Turns out one family in California thought the same thing and has decided to do something about it.  They created The Crayon Initiative, an organization that collects old, broken crayons from individuals, families, schools, restaurants, who ever, and then sorts the crayons by color, melts them to and pours them into new molds to make new crayons.

They then take the new crayons and donates them to sick children in hospitals as well as to children without.

What a great cause, no?

Here's a video we saw as a family last fall when we were eating dinner and had the news on in the background.  Back then we all said, we should do this project next year for Noah's Kindness Project.  The time has now come...
We invite you to join us.  While the kids will be collecting colors at their school, we invite you to participate, too!  If you'd like to donate crayons for this cause, we will be collecting them at our home and then on Saturday, October 1st, we will take time to sort them by color and mail them off to California to be used again.  I think of it as a win-win... not only are we saving thousands of pounds of waste from ending up in a landfill, but we are helping to provide gifts of happiness for sick and deserving children across the country, and in a third win, is we can clean out our closets full of old, broken crayons.  Everyone wins!!!

We will be collecting crayons for the entire month of September so please let us know if you'd like to donate.  And if you are back in Iowa and would like to participate, my sister Megan and her husband Adam have agreed to be a collection site for individuals back there.

We will be sure to weigh the colors and share later how many pounds we've collected.

Thank you for joining us!

Until next time,
Angie


* Photos from of The Crayon Initiative and The Mighty websites