School-Supply Charity Helps to Lighten the Load for Needy Kids

Joshua Marcus was only 10 when he conceived of a charity that would provide children with the

basics he had taken for granted: backpacks and school supplies.

By age 11, he had the group, Sack It to You, up and running, and classified as a charity under the Internal Revenue Code. The Boca Raton, Fla., organization donates the packs, filled with paper, notebooks, glue sticks, pencils, and other student necessities, to schools and charities in the state that ask for them. “If they have the courage to come out and say, ‘Listen, these kids are in a state of need,’ that’s good enough for me,” Joshua says.

It didn’t take long for Joshua to earn respect and a good name in nonprofit circles. Not only did word spread quickly that he would do his best to provide equipment to any group that needed it, but corporations, foundations, family, friends, and his father’s clients also gave him the financial support to turn his good will into booty for kids.

Today, at age 16, Joshua can boast that his organization has distributed new backpacks — most of them donated by Office Depot, which has given the group supplies and cash worth around $257,000 — to more than 8,500 children in preschool through high school. But Sack It to You is just one of Joshua’s many endeavors. He is also vice president of his junior class, finance chairman of his school’s debate team, active in numerous other school clubs, and an honors student.

Joshua became interested in backpacks in the fifth grade, when he decided to work with children from needy families as a way to fulfill his school’s community-service requirement. Not realizing that poor kids lived in Boca Raton, he asked his mother to drive him 45 miles to Miami.

“I didn’t know what was out there,” recalls Joshua. Instead of Miami, his mother took him to Florence Fuller Child Development Centers, an organization in his hometown that serves hundreds of youngsters from low-income families. The parents of many of the children are migrant workers who make meager wages at the area’s numerous vegetable farms and plant nurseries.

Although Joshua was informed that he had to be 14 under county law to work as a volunteer with children, he persisted. When officials at the group told him that the youngsters at Fuller needed backpacks and supplies, he promised to help all 120 graduates of the organization’s preschool — and then he started the charity.

Joshua, president of Sack It to You, distributes most of the backpacks in the spring and summer for the following school year, but he fulfills requests all year long. Most of the backpacks go to children at schools and charities that primarily serve the poor. The majority of the organizations are within a three-hour drive from Joshua’s home, allowing him to hand out the equipment in person and to talk with the recipients about the importance of school.

Now he knows that poverty is all around him. “I see things more clearly,” he says.

Appeals Raise $100,000

His fund-raising appeals have brought in around $100,000. Writing on his own, and steadfastly limiting his parents’ editing, Joshua is explicit about his goals. “It is very important to have the proper tools for learning and for less fortunate children to feel that they have the same chances as their peers,” he wrote in one letter. “I wanted each child to feel special and to have a better start in life.”

The money he raises goes mainly toward purchasing school supplies that Sack It to You stuffs inside each pack.

The job of obtaining and preparing the backpacks, especially during peak periods, is time-consuming, and involves writing countless thank-you letters and other chores that can be off-putting to kids.

“At first it was a lot of work,” says Joshua. “I would want to go out and play basketball with my friends, and I would have to stay home and do paperwork.” He soon realized, however, that the work could be fun if he involved his peers. “So now,” he says, “friends are there helping me.”

Around 20 of his peers help Joshua with numerous tasks, including stuffing the packs with supplies and personalizing each pack with a luggage tag inscribed with the recipient’s name and the group’s slogan: “Packed for success!” Last summer alone, they handled 3,250 backpacks.

Parents Play Key Role

Family members have played a crucial role in the success of Sack It to You. Like many young people for whom charitable work is central, Joshua cites parental support as key to his ability to help others. “I couldn’t have done it without my parents,” he says. “They took me all over. If I didn’t understand something, they helped me.”

Grant makers have found the relationship moving.

“I thought it was wonderful that the whole family was involved,” says Sheri Sauer, a board member of the Toppel Family Foundation, in Boca Raton. Among other things, the foundation helps poor children improve their performance in school. “It seemed to be parents teaching a child how to give back to a community.”

That’s one reason Toppel board members voted to cover the cost of the charity’s warehouse space for the last three years — a $6,000 commitment. They were introduced to Joshua by a teacher in an after-school program the foundation supports.

Joshua’s mother, Shelley, who doesn’t work outside the home, has taken on many of the responsibilities of running Sack It to You. A vice president of the group, Mrs. Marcus is the main point of contact for the schools and charities that receive her son’s backpacks, and she handles all the phone calls that come in during school hours.

His father, Larry Marcus, an accountant who serves as the group’s secretary and treasurer, worked with a lawyer friend to get Sack It to You classified as a charity. Joshua’s half-brother Michael, 25, is also a vice president. No one receives a salary for working at the charity.

The family has always done volunteer work, often through their synagogue, and Mrs. Marcus says she and her husband were delighted that Joshua, who lives in a gated complex with a golf course and tennis center, was so earnest in wanting to help the poor. “We live in a country club and he was going to a private school and he had a very sheltered life,” says Mrs. Marcus. “But there are kids that are bused in from neighborhoods that are not so pretty, and they want what everybody else has.”

Honesty and Dignity

Sack It to You’s premise — that children from low-income families have the same needs and desires as their more affluent peers — impressed senior executives at Office Depot so much that the Delray Beach, Fla., business-supplies company quickly became the charity’s leading provider of backpacks. So far, the company has given Sack It to You more than 7,500 packs.

“Office Depot has a set of values that we live by,” says Mary Wong, who oversees charitable programs. “We make sure that we have honesty and dignity and respect for each other.” She adds: “I think that Josh does that every day.”

Joshua’s relationship with Office Depot started in 1998. He was introduced to David I. Fuente, then the company’s chief executive officer, by Mr. Fuente’s wife, Sheila, who is a trustee of the Fuller Child Development Centers.

At the Fuller Centers, says Anna Marie King, director of development, Joshua is a star among the children, who “sit around him like a pied piper.” Joshua’s donations, she says, save the group money it would otherwise have to spend equipping the youngsters for kindergarten.

And children benefit not only from the boost a new backpack gives them, but also from seeing another young person take interest in their well-being, says Arlin J. Antman, development director at the Chrysalis Center, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., charity that runs programs for children in foster care. “So many foster-care children have been in ‘the system’ for so long, and the only people they see in a helping capacity are adults,” she says. “So it tends to have a really strong impact to have a young man in their age bracket reaching out to help them.”

Ms. Antman says she occasionally receives calls from would-be volunteers who tell her they want to be like Joshua Marcus, and she tries to find ways they can be of help.

Perhaps one of them will take over Sack It to You when Joshua goes to college.

Now in 11th grade, the young president is trying to find a successor, but he is not optimistic he will. Kids have contacted Joshua from other parts of the country saying they wanted to start a group like his, only to drop the idea once they heard how much was involved. If no one comes forward, Joshua may close Sack It to You so he can focus on college and then, perhaps, law school.

Joshua might be ready to restart the organization by the time he has his own family. “Maybe,” he says, “I’ll let my children do it.”