A back-to-school giveaway was held at La Central YMCA on Saturday, Sept. 7, in partnership with the Office of the Bronx Borough President, the Angellyh Yambo Foundation, Metroplus Health, RomoGIS, The Hub Third Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) and the NYPD Community Affairs Bureau.

Families were invited to bring along their kids for a day of fun, games, and of course a backpack giveaway to coincide with the start of the school year.

 

We spoke to Nadia Arroyo, executive director of La Central YMCA about the event. “It went very well, the first one ever,” she said. “We got a lot of donations. We even still have some because we wanted to prep for about 300 families. At the end of the day, we serviced a hundred people that came in.”

 

She continued, “We had about 220 registered, but only a hundred of them showed up, and we still have people trickling in this week just to like, ‘Hey, do you still have backpacks?'”

Arroyo continued, “Since we have open house tomorrow, we’re going to be distributing the rest that we have collected to the community members, but it was amazing! It was like a blessing.”

 

Arroyo also mentioned that the La Central YMCA also plan to hold a similar back-to-school giveaway annually going forward and had been planning this year’s event since the beginning of the summer.

Attendees took at the event holding a large image of Angellyh Yambo, who was fatally shot in the South Bronx in April 2022 not far from her school at age 16. Two of her friends were also shot but survived the incident. The Angellyh Yambo Foundation was founded in her memory with the aim of reducing gun violence and uplifting the lives of local Bronx kids. Click here and here to read stories on the latest legal follow-up to that fatal incident.