The real new year should start in September, when back-to-school for kids means a fresh start, complete with new clothes and new notebooks along with new teachers, rituals, and routines. But for many homeless families in Mercer County, back-to-school can be a stressful time because they can’t afford to buy the new things that traditionally kick off a new school year. There are 500 homeless children in Mercer County and still many others whose families’ budgets are stretched so thin that such new things are simply out of their reach.##M:[more]##
That’s why HomeFront, an organization based in Lawrenceville that helps homeless kids and their families, runs an annual Back-to-School Clothing and Supply Drive. This year more than 1,”000 school-aged children throughout Mercer County received new backpacks stuffed with brand new school clothes and school supplies.
And this time, 120 children received a completely unexpected treat when they opened their backpacks: a pair of Phat Farm shoes, brand-spankin’ new, still wrapped, still in their box. David Mann, general manager of the company that makes the hip and popular footwear, donated 120 pairs of shoes so that kids could have new shoes to wear with their new clothes to start their school year off quite literally, on the right foot. “I believe I have been blessed, so I believe that those who are blessed, must give back,” says Mann. “And when you do that, you don’t feel guilty about having nice things.”
A resident of Plainsboro, Mann is committed to the idea of giving back to the community and also to the idea of teaching children the spirit of giving from an early age. That’s why eight West Windsor Plainsboro students, including his own four children, were involved in the effort to help HomeFront get the shoes distributed.
“We had somebody in our neighborhood collecting used shoes for people in Haiti, and I started thinking that there must be people right here who also needed shoes,” said Katie Brossman, a sophomore at Princeton Day School who helped engineer the contact between HomeFront and Phat Farm Shoes. “And then I thought about kids needing shoes for school, but I know how much I hate wearing hand-me-downs myself and I knew how happy kids would be to get new ones. So then we had to figure out how.”
Brossman met David Mann at a Cranbury-Plainsboro Little League game where his son and her brother were on the same team. Mann bit at the opportunity to get his company involved with the new shoe distribution project, one that Brossman had given a working title of “Going Places.” Once it was decided how many pairs of shoes were needed in what sizes, a giant box containing 120 pairs were shipped directly to HomeFront to be included in the back-to-school backpacks.
Mann is a guy with a self-deprecating sense of humor who goes by the screenname “PhatMann” though he is by no means corpulent as the name would suggest. His work, while based in New York, takes him on the road quite frequently where he meets with the likes of R and B singers Chante Moore and Kenny Latimore. He just returned from a trip to California where he met with people to raise money for poor, black churches. “In my position working with Phat Farm, I meet people who can and should give back, and I try to motivate all these forces to unite and give back. In Los Angeles I have other contacts with celebrities to do a boxing fight for charity and then we plan to bring it back to Philadelphia for my Althea Gibson Tennis Center.”
HomeFront’s Lauren Fine invited Katie and her siblings, Molly, a 7th grader at Stuart Country Day, and William, a first-grader at Town Center, to the offices in Lawrenceville to get a firsthand look at the operation. Joining them were the Mann children, Traci, a freshman at High School North, Brandon, a sixth-grader at Community Middle School, and Jared and Haley, twins who are second-graders at Town Center. Also joining them was Jonathan Ho, a fifth-grader at Village School in West Windsor.
Said Mann, “It’s good for my kids to see their dad do something good, to understand that he can go to work and make a difference too.” Mann has a wealth of community service experience and new ideas and Brossman is planning to tap them for future fundraising activities. “It was great to know that certain kids are very happy wearing their new shoes to school and I’m glad we could help,” she said. As for Mann, he is countering with gratitude of his own. “I thank you for telling me about Homefront. It feels better to help the local crowds who are less fortunate.”
