Sugar Hill Elementary: Bench Buddy

When we launched our Back to School Drive last year, the goal was simple: help local students start the year prepared, confident, and supported. We set out to provide 400 backpacks and 400 school supply kits.

Because of your generosity, we didn't just meet that number—we exceeded it.

And that's where this story really begins. Because extravagant generosity creates margin—room to say yes to opportunities nobody planned for.

Like when a group of second graders at Sugar Hill Elementary noticed that some of their classmates felt alone. No one to sit with. No one to ask to play. So they did what second graders with big hearts do. They wrote letters to their principal asking if they could have a bench—a place where any student who needed a friend could sit down and any student willing to be one would know to come find them.

They asked for one bench. Because of your generosity, we were able to say yes to two. 

We provided two buddy benches for their playground, along with hundreds of snacks from our Be Rich Snack Collection. When our team arrived to deliver them, we didn't just drop off benches—we celebrated the kids who imagined them. We talked with students about what it means to be a good friend. And one by one, they signed their names to the benches they'd advocated for—a quiet promise to help every classmate feel seen.

This is what it looks like to be FOR a community: showing up where we planned to, and thanks to you, having enough left over to show up in the places we couldn’t have planned at all.