amanda riedell

This summer I was an intern with GEICO in Richardson Texas. I was exposed to a community service event called Stuff the Bus while I was working and decided to get involved. We had one month to raise over 16,000 school supplies to beat last years record. I headed the marketing campaign to get the word out. We only had a budget of around $20 so I would go around the office during my breaks to speak with supervisors to get their representatives to donate. The campaign and outside hours my team and I dedicated in turn resulted in breaking a record for over 19,000 school supplies donated. On the day the bus came I spent the entire work day stacking, organizing, and moving boxes of school supplies into a school bus. We had a wide variety of items, this year in particular we were looking for more expensive items such as backpacks to help with a lot of the hurricane Harvey victims. This year was essential because the hurricane had wiped out a lot of the surplus supplies they had. So in previous years they would usually start out with a couple hundred supplies but because they donated it all for the hurricane we had to start at literally zero. We moved the entire 19,000 supplies from the office to the school bus. It was myself and 5 others who were doing this, so it was an all day event and was a lot of manual labor. It was a lot of work, but being able to help underprivileged students be able to receive free (and new) school supplies was very rewarding. The sponsors of the event had shown us pictures of the students walking into the stuffed school bus and getting to pick out their own supplies was really cool. They even had talked to the parents of the kids that were there and they were so grateful that we had donated and worked to supply this much for their kids. They liked how we had organized the bus into different sections based on the category, so it was a lot easier for the kids to fid exactly what they wanted. Evidently in the past it was just thrown into backpacks, and not organized as well as we had done this year. The messages and thank yous that we received were very touching and I am very glad I was able to make a difference in some kids' lives. I will be participating in this again for this annual event next summer.