Mom's Backpack Charity Grows
Rosanna Kingston, of Clermont, Florida, is the local mom behind Give A Kid A Backpack Foundation Inc., is delivering backpacks filled with school and health supplies to children in Costa Rica and Nicaragua this week.

"It's really taken off," her husband, Laurence Kingston, said Wednesday of the backpack charity. "It's really blossomed."

The nonprofit foundation started a little more than two years ago when Rosanna Kingston, a 34-year-old mother of two, collected and delivered more than 400 backpacks filled with supplies to impoverished children in Ecuador.

Since then she has delivered about 500 backpacks to El Salvador and now is taking about 300 backpacks to Costa Rica and Nicaragua schoolchildren.

Although Kingston was born in the United States, her parents are from Ecuador and she has traveled to Central America frequently. She has said the backpacks give the kids, who often lived in tiny buildings crammed with other children, a "private space in their impoverished lives."

Laurence Kingston said his wife should return to Clermont next week, but more trips to deliver gift backpacks are planned.