Our Third Annual Pay-What-You-Can Educator Extravaganza + Resource Fair was a Huge Success!
On Saturday, August 9, we held our third annual Pay-What-You-Can Educator Extravaganza + Resource Fair in partnership with Austin ISD Sustainability.
In total, we served 158 public educators from 97 different schools and 11 different ISDs plus public charters and more. We distributed approximately $6,300 worth of educational materials with $3,039 in contributions, which means that we gave away approximately $3,260 worth of materials entirely for free. Here’s a breakdown of the most popular items: 2,000 pencils, 900 colored pencils, 885 markers, 610 crayons, 595 highlighters, 535 books, 280 cookie cutters, 200 packs of foil paper, 180 notebooks, 160 posters, 156 packs of notebook paper, 150 reams of paper, 60 science kits and 54 lightbulbs. Fifty of the participating teachers were new to ACR, and we’re so glad to have been able to widen our network of educators with this event!
For the first time, we also hosted a resource fair at the event, and were joined by ten local community organizations that provided free resources for incorporating sustainability, environmental education, and STEAM into classrooms. Huge thanks to these partners: TAME, MINDPOP, ecoRise, Keep Austin Beautiful, Texas Disposal Systems, City of Austin Urban Forest Program, Ghisallo Cycling Initiative, Eco Academy, Goodwill Central Texas and the National Wildlife Federation.
This event is one of our favorites of the whole year, and we’re already looking forward to next year’s! Huge thanks to our hand-working employees, incredible volunteers, community partners and amazing educators for making this our best Educator Extravaganza to date! We even made it on the local news!
If you’re an educator and you missed it, we are accepting applications for our Materials Mobile, which is a trailer of school supplies that we bring to Austin-area schools so that teachers can select whatever they need for their classrooms at no cost! The cost of the visit is normally covered by the school (about $350), but we have scholarships available if cost is a barrier. A core tenant of our mission is to keep supplies out of the landfill and get them into classrooms, so these programs are designed to do just that!