Prior to the start of school since 2008, MAS Bay Area volunteers provide thousands of backpacks full of school supplies to foster and orphan children in the San Francisco Bay Area. MAS Bay Area's 8th Annual Back to School Project this summer provided 1,200 backpacks for the upcoming new school year. The backpacks were distributed on Monday, Aug. 3. To date, the project has helped 5,563 schoolchildren. The backpacks are distributed through non-profit agencies that hand out the backpacks and school supplies to its deserving child clients. Recipient children are foster children, orphans, refugees, homeless, members of low-income households, or homes where domestic violence has occurred. Partner non-profit agencies this year were Child Advocates of Silicon Valley, Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), Next Door Solutions, Legal Advocates for Children and Youth (LACY), Rahima Foundation, Islamic Center of Alameda, and the Oakland Humanitarian Day. This project fulfills all the school supplies needs of several of these organizations. Young volunteers as young as 18 months have helped sort and fill the backpacks with school supplies. This year, MAS Bay Area also provided books for younger children under 5. A generous $5,000 grant from United Muslim Relief, $6,000 raised from a Ramadan Crowdfunding campaign, and several individual donors made a larger backpack donations possible. Last year, MAS Bay Area donated 1,000 backpacks to area schoolchildren.

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