Charity recycles school supplies for homeless youth

By Andrea Domanick

Sunday, July 5, 2015 | 2 a.m.

At the end of the school year, most students are relieved to rid themselves of binders, pencils and notebooks for the summer. Erica Korbel prefers to collect them.

For the past five years, the recent Bishop Gorman High School graduate has spent the last days of each school year gathering discarded supplies for homeless students through her organization Students United in Recycling School Supplies.

What began as a dinner table idea Korbel had in seventh grade while attending Las Vegas Day School has expanded into a supply drive that reaches three valley schools and delivers truckloads of gently used school supplies to the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth.

“I would see people throwing stuff out at the end of the year, and I was tired of seeing that everything was still perfectly usable,” said Korbel, 18. “I was talking to my family over dinner about community service and how there are students who need supplies at the beginning of the year, so I thought, why not use those from the end of it?”

Korbel placed plastic bins from Target in her school’s hallway, and in a matter of days collected enough supplies to fill her family’s Ford Expedition — twice. Working alone, it took her nearly two months to sort, clean and box the supplies for donation.

When she began high school at Bishop Gorman, Korbel was able to pare the task down to two weeks with the help of five student volunteers.

“The hard part wasn’t getting supplies but getting people to help clean and organize them,” she said.

Eventually, school officials agreed to give students required volunteer hours for participating in Korbel’s program.

“We were able to put up fliers and make announcements to spread the word,” she said. “Once people could get hours for it, it was much faster.”

The Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth signed on to begin loading and moving supplies with its own truck, and collections were added to Las Vegas Day School’s elementary school and middle school, where Korbel started the program.

Today, Korbel’s group keeps the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth’s drop-in center stocked with school supplies year-round and has become an important part of the organization’s mission to help meet students’ needs and steer them toward success.

“It’s hard to know that kids my age are going through such incredible challenges but still fighting for it and getting help when they need it, and fighting for education,” said Korbel, who has attended graduation ceremonies for many of the students her organization has helped. “Many would just give up, but it’s encouraging to see that in hard times, they’re still pursuing it. I’m grateful to provide a small part in helping them get there.”

As she prepares for the next step in her own education as a freshman at Boise State University, Korbel, who hopes to become an orthopedic surgeon, admits it’s bittersweet to leave her program behind. But she is confident in the junior classmate she recruited to run Students United in Recycling School Supplies in her absence and hopes to return at the beginning of next summer to oversee its progress.

“I’ve been raised to be very aware of what I have and appreciate it and not let a lot of it go to waste — literally and figuratively,” Korbel said.