The new Cache Valley Humanitarian Center, along with the two rotary clubs of Cache Valley, met on Thursday to put together school kits for children in need.
100 school kits were completed on Thursday for children in Cache Valley who are at or below the poverty level, including school supplies like notebooks, pencils, binders and even a backpack.
Kits will first be given to the school districts that have requested them, and then to other area nonprofits. Distribution of the school kits began on Tuesday.
“We will distribute to the various school districts based on what they've requested," said Dwight Whittaker, the key organizer of the project and one of the founding members of the new Cache Valley Humanitarian Center. "And each school has indicated, you know, they would like 10, 20, 30, 40 kits per school. And, and so we'll distribute those to the district, the district will then distribute them out to the different schools.”
Whittaker served as the chairman of the board for the Idaho Falls Area Humanitarian Center and saw the impact that organization had on the community.
“I've seen what can happen in a community," Whittaker said. "When we moved to Cache Valley, I just kept thinking, this is a similar demographics here in the valley, wonderful people really wanting to help their neighbors, etc, and so forth. So why not?”
And people did step up to help their neighbors. Supplies for the school kits were provided by grants from North Logan Walmart and the Logan Rotary Club Foundation, as well as donations from Cache Valley citizens.
Whittaker says that after the project is completed, there will be around 300 kits available for children in the valley.
