A Gift for Teaching

A pencil, A crayon, or A simple piece of paper can create the foundation for students to learn, create, and grow. More than 68% of the students in central Florida are members of families that can't afford lunch. The financial realities of their families alone make acquiring the tools necessary to experience academic success just out of reach. Moved by this need and the fact that teachers, on average, spend up to $1,000 out of their own pockets each year to provide basic supplies for their students, philanthropist and nonprofit professional, gary landwirth, founded A Gift for Teaching (agft) in 1998. Agft's mission is to improve public education by providing resources and surplus materials free to teachers for their students in need. Agft has worked toward fulfilling this mission by focusing on three core issues: 1) the hundreds of thousands of children who can't afford essential school supplies; 2) declining school spending on supplies for students and classrooms; and 3) businesses that routinely discard supplies that could be recycled and re-purposed for educational use.a Gift for Teaching (agft) distributes more than $65,000 worth of supplies each day to teachers who bring them back into the classrooms for their students in need. Nearly 25 years of service $160 million dollars of distributed school supplies have cemented agft as central Florida's promary provider of free school supplies year round. Our many partners have made it possible for this organization to help millions of children succeed by hosting more than 350,000 teacher "free" shopping visits.by keeping organizational overhead below 5%, agft has diverted more than 18 million pounds of goods from landfills, distributed more than 2.3 million books to classrooms and 14.5 million pencils into students hands.the organization operates A store where teachers working in central Florida's most underserved schools can obtain free supplies for their students and classrooms, surplus materials and other contributions are solicited from businesses and individuals and are made available to the teachers of eligible schools. During 2022- 2023 there were approximtely 18,700 teacher shopping visits with an estimated value totaling $11,006,097 of school supplies provided.