story and photos by Nancy Peevy, special to The City Wire
Walmart U.S. and Coty hosted 300 business, school and thought leaders at the fifth annual Champions for Kids Conference on Thursday (Nov. 13) at the DoubleTree Suites Hotel in Bentonville.
Champions for Kids was founded in 2004 when president and CEO Adelaide Schaeffer received a phone call from Fayetteville High School a few days before Christmas that Daniel, a teenaged boy was homeless and had nowhere to go. Schaeffer and her husband, Rick, took Daniel home and he lived with them for the next few years.
From that beginning, Schaeffer became aware of the escalating needs of children and founded Champions for Kids with three core commitments: to provide help for all children; to focus on leveraging people to help children; and to remain true to their core values that all children should have someone who cares, a place to belong, hope for tomorrow and provisions for their journey.
In the United States, 16.8 million children go to school cold, hungry or without sufficient resources. Poverty and hunger are strongly linked in America. When a child goes to school hungry, it is likely this child also goes to school without the resources they need for success: basic school supplies, warm clothes, hygiene needs, nutritious food, dental care, eye care and more.
“If you are born into poverty as a child, you have an 80 percent chance of staying in poverty for your whole life – that’s a national statistic,” Bill Simon, former Walmart president and CEO, said at the conference. “The 20 percent that have mobility is because there was an intervention, a person or organization like Champions For Kids.”
In Schaeffer’s address, she gave the Champions for Kids’ vision for 2015 by addressing poverty in the United States and then explaining solutions the organization is using to address it.
“It is a crisis of poverty,” she said. “One out of 3 children is homeless, literally. ... It’s bigger than a hunger issue, those kids likely don’t have access to eye care, dental care, warm clothes, life opportunities. Poverty is so big, I can’t say we’re going to solve poverty or hunger. But we have to think about what we can do, not what we can’t do.”
Schaeffer said most philanthropy misses the citizen sector, where the average citizen gets involved in their community to make a difference. Champions for Kids is changing the model of philanthropy by getting ordinary citizens involved in their own communities by using a program called, “Simple Giving”, and they are partnering with Walmart to do it.
Shoppers simply go to their local Walmart, purchase items that are highlighted as needed by children, such as school supplies or hygiene items, and drop them in a purple donation bin after checkout. All donations go to children in the same school district. Schaeffer said Walmart is their test for the program.
“It’s a nice pilot, because if we get it right here ... it is just a step to bring it to other retailers,” she said.
Walmart began the program with just a few stores in Arkansas, but has expanded to stores in the Midwest part of the country. Champions for Kids and Walmart announced Thursday that the program is expanding to include Walmart stores in the western U.S.
Carol Johnston, senior vice president Central Plains operations with Walmart, said the program has been successful.
“It was so simple. Our communities really do care what happens to their children. When you hand something over to associates at Walmart ... and you’ve got children involved, they just take over,” she said, adding that many cashiers actively ask shoppers to participate in the program.
“Some of the stores we saw that had the largest poverty were the stores that were most successful,” Johnston said. “Sometimes when people don’t have anything to give, the heart finds a way to give.”
The vision of Champions for Kids and their partners is to help 20 million children by the year 2020, Schaeffer said.
The conference on Thursday celebrated the 5.3 million children that Champions for Kids helped this year and the 233,326 people across the country who partnered with them to do it.
As part of the celebration, several business leaders were honored as torchbearers for using their position, talents and sphere of influence to impact the lives of children. Those honored were:
• David Glass, former Walmart CEO and Kansas City Royals owner;
• Bill Simon, former Walmart president and CEO;
• Andy Carter, divisional merchandising director, Central Plains division, Walmart;
• Hank Schepps from Colgate;
• WendyJean Bennett from Tyson;
• Leslie Godwin from Kellogg; and
• Cari Taylor from Purell.
Champions for Kids inducted Labeed Diab, president of health and wellness, Walmart and Julie Murphy, EVP and president of Walmart western business unit, as lead torchbearers for 2015.
At the conference, it was also announced that an anonymous donor has agreed to give Champions for Kids $5,000 in additional funds, if the organization receives 100 gifts of any size between now and Dec. 2. All proceeds will go to school nurses to help meet the most urgent health and education needs of kids.
Jonah Berger, author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On,” was the keynote speaker and related his research on viral marketing to promoting the mission of Champions for Kids.