Simon Youth Foundation students have graduation in the bag with support from New Jersey mall shoppers

Shopping bags are a convenient way of carrying purchases from store to home, but in Jersey City, N.J., merchandise bags sold to shoppers at Newport Centre, a Simon Malls property, have carried Simon Youth Foundation high school seniors to their graduation day.

A Newport Centre customer poses for a photo
after  making a Simon shopping bag purchase

The blue bags with the Simon logo are sold at the Newport Centre guest-services desk for $1. In 2010, Newport Center sold nearly 1,300 of its Simon shopping bags. Hundreds more have already been sold this year, and every penny of those bag sales went to SYF.

Our SYF education-services team estimates that it takes $1,000 to support one Simon Youth Academy student through his or her graduation day. In this context, the shoppers at Newport Centre, through their support of the shopping bag sales program, have made sure that over the last year two students didn't fall through the cracks to become drop-out statistics, students like Deneal Yazzie, a homeless senior student at our Simon Youth Academy in Phoenix, Ariz., and Olga Courtney, a recent graduate from our Simon Youth Academy in Youngstown, Ohio.

Newport Centre's Director of Mall Marketing and Business Development may put it best when she describes the bag-sale fundraiser.

"Every dollar counts, and it makes a difference if we can touch the life of just one student," Jill Daniel says. "Newport Centre is proud of our customers and our community for buying Simon shopping bags to support at-risk youth."

The Simon shopping bag sales are ongoing at Newport Centre and many other Simon Malls nationwide.