MLBA NextGen assembles 1,000 backpacks for children
Alorica · 2023 · Education
For the third consecutive year, MLBA NextGen U.S. youth volunteers assembled 1,000 backpacks of school supplies for children in underserved communities in Santa Ana, CA, in partnership with the Seva Collective.
A thousand backpacks, packed by kids for kids
For the third year in a row, the U.S. youth volunteers of MLBA NextGen raised money and assembled 1,000 backpacks full of school supplies for children in underserved communities in the Santa Ana, California area. The effort was run in partnership with the Seva Collective, a local community organisation.
What sets the drive apart is that the children did the work. Each NextGen youth volunteer designed and pitched their own passion project, then raised money to fund it and fill the backpacks. The projects were focused on education, science, sports, financial literacy, and community support.
The numbers
- 1,000 backpacks assembled and donated to children in need.
- Third consecutive year of the Santa Ana drive.
- Delivered by MLBA NextGen U.S. youth volunteers with the Seva Collective; the 2023 build also drew logistical support from South Coast Container.
What MLBA NextGen is
MLBA NextGen is the designated youth arm of Making Lives Better with Alorica (MLBA), the company's employee-fuelled non-profit. The program is built to empower young leaders to make lives better in their own communities while learning practical business skills such as presenting, money management, and marketing.
The backpack drive is a clean example of that dual purpose: the children served their community, and in doing so they ran a small fundraising and logistics operation of their own. Beyond the U.S., NextGen chapters in Latin America ran their own projects in the same period, including a pet-food drive in Panama and a fundraiser for the Neurologic Institute of Guatemala.
Inside a different model of corporate giving
MLBA describes itself as unlike most corporate philanthropy, which tends to be run top-down. Instead, Alorica employees choose and lead the causes, and Alorica underwrites the machinery. The company is the non-profit's primary corporate partner, providing administrative resources, logistics, and personnel costs.
The scale of that employee engine was significant in 2023. According to the MLBA 2023 Impact Report:
- The MLBA community raised over $846,000 during the year.
- Those funds helped award 943 grants for needs including medical bills, housing, food, and funeral expenses.
- The annual Angel Program alone raised over $64,000 for local organisations and charities.
MLBA sits within the Philanthropy pillar of Alorica's broader environmental, social, and governance framework, which the company organises under three headings: Philanthropy, People, and Planet.
Why it matters
School-supply drives are common corporate fare, but the NextGen structure changes what the activity produces. A backpack handed to a child in Santa Ana is the visible output; the less visible one is a cohort of young volunteers who learned to pitch an idea, raise money for it, and deliver it. That maps to the education goals of SDG 4 on two fronts at once.
For a customer-experience company whose business runs on frontline people in the communities where it operates, an employee-led, locally chosen model of giving is also strategically coherent. The people packing the backpacks and the people answering the calls are, in many cases, drawn from the same neighbourhoods.