ATLANTA — As we celebrate 75 years of history in north Georgia, there is one annual story that rally’s the entire community around a single effort.
It started as friends cooking dinner for homeless women and their kids. Today it’s Atlanta’s premier back to school campaign: Stuff the Bus.
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“We were a little bit crazy, but we thought, let’s see if we can make a difference,” Children’s Restoration Network co-founder Jim Cox said. “It’s really been an amazing, an amazing journey.”
The late Jim Cox and Cliff Kinsey would go on a purposeful journey and their friendship led to developing the non-profit in 1993. They were destined to help homeless and abused women with children.
“You know we started out doing some goodwill and it’s turned into an organization that is truly making a difference in the life of many kids,” Kinsey said.
The fast friends with a heart for service spent the next 10 years collecting school supplies for kids living in shelters and foster group homes.
Their journey led to the office of former WSB-TV Community and Public Affairs Director Jocelyn Dorsey.
“And so, me and Jim walked into her office and literally what she said...as she would tell it if she was here...look at these two white guys coming in here talking about we’re going to help out the homeless kids in metro Atlanta. What are they doing?” Kinsey said.
From that meeting, a 20-year partnership was formed. Stuff the Bus is now WSB-TV’s premier community affairs initiative.
“And it’s become a legacy project for WSB, where the entire station, people in front of the camera, people behind the camera, we all rally behind it, get together, hang out on undoubtably the hottest Saturday in July. But we help get these kids ready to go back to school in style,” WSB-TV Community and Public Affairs Director Condace Pressley said.
Our stuff the bus campaign has grown from stuffing a single bus to now stuffing seven school buses, located all over metro Atlanta.
Over 5,000 backpacks stuffed with an assortment of school supplies were distributed last year.
“So anything that we can do to rally behind these kids to make sure that they’re prepared to learn and to be successful students is, it’s an incredible gift to the community because, after all, these are the young people who are going to be taking care of us when we get old,” Pressley said.
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