Dear one and all,

Eddie’s Backpacks is a student-led initiative. We are reaching out to community leaders, organisations and businesses to help support this campaign.

Foster care plays a vital role in our community. Every year, over 3500 children in Victoria alone are placed in foster homes. These children often find themselves coming from difficult situations into a strange and new environment, often arriving into foster care with nothing, and with placements happening quickly, foster carers have no time to arrange for personal items.

Eddie’s Backpacks was first created by Parade boys to provide basic necessities, as well as a sense of familiarity and worth, of belonging and comfort to children who arrive in foster care. The program has now been running for more than five years, and has provided over a thousand backpacks to children in foster care and other disadvantaged children within Melbourne.

Feedback from carers and children alike have shown that personal items can make a huge positive difference to kids who have been traumatised.

Our goal this year is to put together 600 new backpacks in total for children of all ages, to be distributed through Foster care Association of Victoria. We are hoping for donations of any sort, be it monetary or physical items - anything that fits in a backpack and would put a smile on a child’s face - from coloured pencils and colouring-in books through to pyjamas, beanies and toothbrushes, etc.).

If you can help in this regard, please contact me on 0402 905646 or digby.morrell@parade.vic.edu.au

Thankyou for your time, and we do hope you can lend your support.

Sincerely,

Digby Morrell (on behalf of the Eddie’s Backpack Team)