The idea came to the duo of Emma Zamora and Jaelin Lopez last spring during their junior year at Veterans Memorial High School (VMHS). With the return of in-person instruction and the start of their senior year this year, the team has worked their idea into a community service project for their DECA organization.

Zamora and Lopez discovered that children in unfortunate situations to include foster care and safe homes often struggle in school and getting the materials they need to be successful in school. To help meet that need, the two started Learning for the American Dream. They have been raising awareness of the issue amongst their campus and elsewhere, while also raising money to buy books and school supplies for children.

“As economic status plays a huge part in the development of children,” their story behind the project says. “The only way for us to directly aid the children impacted is by supplying them with needed materials so they can forge their own academic life.”

Often, with the overcrowding in these homes and safe houses, there aren’t enough resources for each individual. Their purpose is to provide these children with the proper tools they need to prosper in school. Materials such as books, notebooks, binders, pens, pencils, journals, coloring materials, and packs of paper.

“Our main goal is to bring awareness to the community, and to provide school supplies to children that are in tough situations, so that they can use schools as an outlet to pave the way toward a better life,” says their website.

To date, their efforts have resulted in a donation of over 200 books and school supplies to the Children’s Advocacy Center in Mission. They are continuing their fundraising efforts with the hopes of making a large school supply purchase in January. They created a GoFundMe page to make the collection of donations easier, and also a webpage to learn more about their project and the resulting donations of books and school supplies. You can find the Learning for the American Dream webpage https://learning-for-the-american-dream7.webnode.com/. Donations can be made in support of their efforts through their GoFundMe page, https://gofund.me/3a509876.

Pictured are Emma Zamora and Jaelin Lopez during a recent school supply drop off for the Children’s Advocacy Center.