Community
30 September, 2024
Back-to-school service
HELP is on the way for families in Mossman who are still recovering from the devastating events of TC Jasper with a new pop-up shop from School Savvy coming to town ahead of the 2025 school season with supplies and uniforms for families in need.
After a 2024 campaign that almost doubled the number of families receiving support, School Savvy by Centacare has launched its 2025 campaign with even more support for FNQ with two new pop-up shops including one in Mossman. The other is yet to be confirmed.
The state government has also announced a commitment of $680,000 to School Savvy over four years if reelected.
For this campaign School Savvy is calling on the community to donate new and pre-loved uniforms – as the main priority – not only for Cairns schools but FNQ schools in general, school supplies like backpacks, notebooks, pencils, markers, etc, and new lunch boxes and water bottles – for hygiene reasons these must be new.
Ten new trainees have also joined the program, and they’ll ensure the smooth running of the pop up shops.
“Through the 2024 program we helped 1080 families, 2330 students and provided 227 haircuts,” School Savvy communications officer Rachel Wilson said.
“Donations are ongoing, even though we have the pop-up stores starting from January next year, any donations we get we always have people that start halfway through school term or start of term three or four so it’s about topping up the resources that we have.
“We’ve got two more locations as of January of next year, we’ve reached out to the Mossman community, and they said there’s a real need there.
“As far as cost of living concerns, I think we’re going to get a huge influx coming in to the pop-up shops so we’ll have to see how donations go.
“That’s why we’re calling for sponsors now, we’ll need a lot more than what we’ve had in the past.
“When people are planning to go for their back-to-school shopping, when they’re getting the 10 textbooks or notebooks from Big W or Kmart buy an extra one and donate.”
State member for Cairns Michael Healy said initiatives like School Savvy deserved more financial support.
“This is a fantastic initiative, I’ve been aware of it since it started, it’s helped so many people out there particularly now in quite a needy time so I’m so pleased to announce we’re making a commitment of $680,000 over the next four years,” he said.
“What that does is provide more security to the people of Centacare who do such a fantastic job and I’d like to be able to help further down the road.”
Ms Wilson said this commitment would mean School Savvy could extend their outreach to more communities in FNQ.
To help out visit: www.centacarefnq.org/school-savvy-1
