In this month’s Lawyers Give Back, we turn the spotlight to public schools, and specifically, Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). Our kids are MNPS students, and, every day, we see the hard work MNPS teachers do, as well as the resources they need to accomplish this work.

For July, our billable hour supports the Pencil Foundation, a nonprofit that works directly with MNPS to help provide those resources.

As the name suggests, the Pencil Foundation does in fact provide pencils to MNPS classrooms—and many other needed items, too. But its reach goes far beyond school supplies. It also partners with local companies, universities and other community groups to close other types of gaps.

For example, while many MNPS schools have thriving parent-teacher organizations that provide things like teacher appreciation to the faculty and staff, others don’t. Enter the Pencil Foundation’s Pencil Partners, which can pick up the slack in this and many other departments. Pencil Partnerships and individual volunteers also serve as reading partners, career mentors and tutors. All the ways to pitch in can be found here.

The fact that our public schools–the foundation on which our society is built–don’t already have all of the resources they need to succeed is a discussion for another day. It’s a shame, really, that public school funding needs to be crowdsourced at all.

But until that’s fixed, we are lucky that Nashville has a trusted partner like the Pencil Foundation to help close this critical gap.