SCOTT COUNTY, Ky. (LEX 18) — When Anna Lewis met the Amazon delivery driver in her driveway, she was excited to learn that he had 54 packages for her. Everything in these boxes is about to go towards helping Scott County students get their education this year.
“You have pencils, pens, grippers, erasers, there's glue sticks, there's markers,” Lewis said as she opened a box.
Lewis is the founder and owner of Timeless Treasures. The business has seen tremendous growth over the past three years.
“What I do is I take breast milk, ashes, hair, flowers, anything that they hold near and dear, and I preserve it and I turn it into keepsakes for them so that they can hold on to that time in their life,” Lewis explained. “I think this year I started with around 35,000 people and I just hit 53,000.”
Timeless Treasures set up a back-to-school drive in 2024, and customers donated 1,000 backpacks to students in Scott County and central Kentucky. This year, Lewis had a different idea.
“I wanted to provide an opportunity where people could come together and not just feel like they're giving an empty backpack, but they're giving everything that a child needs for school,” she said.
Lewis found backpack boxes that accomplished this goal.
“They were about $35 on Amazon, so it's an affordable way that people can come together and say, ‘Hey, I want to help out in any way that I can.’”
Lewis created an Amazon wish list for customers to purchase and donate supplies if they wanted to help out. She expected to have the list open for two weeks. Instead, she could only leave it open for eight hours.
“I didn't think it was going to explode how it did,” shared Lewis. “I had the deadline until August 10th and within 24 hours I had to shut it down.”
After shutting down the option to purchase the backpack boxes, Lewis was given other back-to-school needs she could add to the list. The generous donations, courtesy of customers from all over the world, include this long list of items:
- 123 backpack boxes, complete with supplies to go in the backpacks
- 2,250 pencils
- 120 ‘welcome back’ notebooks
- 125 fidgets
- 482 black pens
- 150 fun pens
- 30 packs of loose-leaf paper
- 128 bracelets
- 180 glue sticks
- 150 headphones
- 1,617 plastic folders
Through Tuesday, less than half of the items have been delivered to Timeless Treasures. Lewis now has the task of delivering the items.
“I have reached out to the Family Resource Center in Stamping Ground,” she said. “I plan on dropping everything off this week as, as things arrive. We're expecting truckloads worth of supplies to be dropped off.”
“The Family Resource that I'm giving it to in Scott County is very, very great about distributing it where it needs to go," she said. "I have full faith that everything's going to be given out where it needs to go.”
