How Operation Teddy Bear Helps...

The Students

Operation Teddy Bear addresses these needs by providing our signature schoolbags, educational materials and wellness tools to every first grade student at select schools in our service area each year. The schoolbags contain such items as reading and coloring books, writing journals, crayons, STEAM-related items, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and of course, teddy bears!

The Teachers

The program also provides teachers with supplies, including items such as white board marker/eraser sets, tissues, pencils and glue sticks.

The Community

And that's not all. Our volunteers love taking the time to read an original story about “Teddy the volunteer” to the students, which facilitates a lesson about kindness, compassion, volunteering and identifying emotions, and uses the experience of receiving a gift as encouragement to "pay it forward." 

We also partner with GreenVetsLA and their nonprofit vocational rehabilitation program, Vets Corps USA, to produce the schoolbags locally, which provides job training for disabled, homeless and/or unemployed veterans.

This multi-faceted approach sets the students up for success and everyone wins!

Keeping Up with the Needs of the Students

Each year, we survey the teachers and principals to gather feedback on the program and how it fits the students’ needs. The feedback also allows us to adapt the materials as the school experience changes and evolves.

For example, teachers had been requesting more quality non-fiction reading books and writing journals with room to draw pictures to help the students to better meet the Common Core Curriculum Standards, emphasizing science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM). We were able to grant those requests in recent years, and we also added two new items based on the feedback we received: a volunteer-made “Rekenrek” Counter to assist each first-grader with concepts of math and counting – and calm fidgety fingers – and a STEAM Engineering Kit to help the students learn to build two- and three-dimensional shapes.

We also make changes to the program based on the latest community needs. The schoolbag now includes wellness items, including writing prompts to help them identify how they’re feeling and a tag attached to the teddy bear suggesting they give the bear a hug and take a deep breath when they’re nervous or afraid, which the volunteers demonstrate in class. These additions were incorporated to address the mental health crisis facing youth nationwide and further the goals of the Volunteer Center's focus on this issue locally. All of these improvements provide the students with even better tools they need to succeed and allow them to practice what they learned in class at home.

Revealing the surprise with volunteers from Kinecta

Special teddy bear instructions with volunteers from the Port of LA