Giving Back To Your Community With School Supplies

If you know me you’ll know that I am super passionate about giving back to my community when I can. This year we have been fortunate enough to give back in more ways than once!

*** I apologize in advance for the horrible images. However, this is real life. I had all 3 children with me and just couldn’t manage to pull out my Canon T5 so I used my horrible camera that my Apple iPhone 4s offers! ***

As I have grown into adulthood I’ve realized how fortunate my family is. I’m so blessed to be a stay at home Mom {although it’s A LOT of patience and trying to keep busy!} and have found a passion for giving back about 8 years ago when I own CincinnatiCoupons.net. It was during this time that I began to donate grocery staples to the Brighton Center and Inter Parish Ministry. Over time I have introduced giving back to Beanies and now TT girl is quickly following behind and wanting to give back to little kids too.

At Beanies 5th Birthday party she asked for donations for Bake Me Home which is a non-profit right up the street from our home. It was started by twin sisters who were 12 at the time and I introduced that to Beanies. She left the donations wanting to do more. So for her 6th birthday party she again asked for donations and ended up donating 2 birthday bags full or donations, 2 bags of salt for their driveway along with $100! She was so proud to hand over that money.

So this summer we’ve been using our Bordeom Jar That Involves Giving Back. We will be telling all about that later 😉 but for now I want to tell you about our recent donations that both girls were proud to participate in….

This was the first year that we participated in the #GivingBackPacks campaign and proud to say that we partnered with Aldi to make this happen. You see Aldi sent the girls and I a $25 Gift Certificate to use at our local Aldi store. We’ve been there a handful of times over the summer to purchase their snacks and a few of the SimplyFit canned goods. So we needed to stock up on back to school snacks and gather our supplies for this campaign…

I was surprised to see a few things like the Apple & Eve Fruit boxes that greeted us as soon as we entered the store {I ended up buying 2 because it’s a great alternative to water in lunch boxes! The girls love the suspense of what’s in their lunch boxes}.

We then came across a end cap FILLED with backpacks for $6.99! {Do you call them backpacks or book bags?!?}. I was pleasantly surprised to see how nice these backpacks were for $6.99. There were 3 zipper spots on the outside of the bag and then on the inside was a divider type thing to separate folders from everything else. I ended up buying one for Beanies and in hopes that we won’t end up with bent folders this year!

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Then as we strolled the store I couldn’t find any of the school supplies that were on sale in the Weekly Aldi ad. So I asked the cashier and she pointed it right to me. It was on a pallet in front of my store as I was exiting. I told them they needed to move it and they brought a pallet lift over to place it in the back by the book bags….see I call them book bags!

Everything was $1.99. So we filled up on highlighters, Sharpies, pencils, dry erase markers and pens!

Once we were done shopping we headed next door to Staples. I had a coupon for $10 off the purchase of $10 or more. So I told the girls that they each had $10 to spend and was hoping to leave Staples paying less than $15 for a cart full of stuff…okay maybe a basket full of stuff and that’s just what we did!

With our coupon we ended up paying just under $13 for the added school supplies from Staples! So in total with the product that we bought at Aldi we spent a total of $38 for everything included in the image below and saved $10!

Now I will tell you that the prices at Aldi are going to be available through the week of August 12th. Just like anything at Aldi everything has a limited quantity so be sure to head to your local store as soon as possible to score an amazing deal on school supplies.

The girls and I dropped everything off after our trips to Aldi and Staples. They even helped the volunteers to unload their donations and put it into piles for the children to pick out items that they need from their school supply list. I think TT truly had the most fun out of all of us as this was her real first time being hands on with donating & being a big helper!

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for you to #GiveBackPacks with my friend Amee over at Madame Deals, a few fellow bloggers and myself. If you fill a backpack be sure to share an image with me and I encourage you to give back to your own community. Your heart becomes filled with happiness and a sense of accomplishment. Not to mention you will be putting smiles on children’s faces as they receive their school supplies!

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