The Rockford Volunteers Who Have Done This for 14 Years
Humraha News
Three hundred and fifty backpacks, a fire truck, and a group of doctors and engineers who took the day off to hand them out.
Humraha News is our weekly spotlight on good news from the Muslim community. A culture of good news, one story at a time.
Every August for fourteen years, a group of volunteers in Rockford, Illinois has done the same unglamorous thing. They buy backpacks. They fill them with paper and pencils. They set up tables on the west side of town and hand them to whoever shows up.
This year it was 350 of them, given out free to students from low-income families. The ICNA Rockford backpack drive is one node in a national program that has now distributed more than a million backpacks to American students since 2008.
What we love about this one is the deliberateness of the choice. ICNA Rockford's own mosque sits on the east side of the city, in the wealthier part of town. They could have run the giveaway from their own parking lot and called it a day.
They go west instead, and the president of the chapter, Dr. Khalid Siddiqui, is blunt about why.
You have to realize this west side of the town is a little bit under privileged. Not a lot of kids can afford it. So we chose the west side of the town.Dr. Khalid Siddiqui, ICNA Rockford, to WTVO
Siddiqui has worked the ICU at Mercy Health for more than fifteen years. He arrived in Rockford in 1998 and co-founded the chapter in 2014. The rest of the operation runs the same way: an all-volunteer staff of doctors, engineers and neighbors who treat it as an obligation rather than a project.
The backpacks are not the whole of it either. The same volunteers run a free clinic every Saturday from 11 to 1, where licensed physicians do health checks for anyone who needs them. There is a food pantry. There is clothing distribution. The backpack day itself comes with the fire department bringing a truck out for the kids to climb on.
The line that stayed with us: a new backpack, Siddiqui said, gives a child confidence walking in on the first day. That is the whole theory of change. One less thing to feel different about.
Fourteen years is a long time to keep showing up for something that produces no headline most years. That is usually the tell for the real thing.
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