Walking around her living room, Anita Martin weaved through the boxes of binders, highlighters, folders, and backpacks that had come to dominate her otherwise tidy front room.

Since October — when most people have moved on from back-to-school shopping — Martin had been quietly accumulating a top-notch arsenal of supplies: 120 backpacks to be exact — ranging in every color and style imaginable — and an indeterminable number of equally important tools to fill them.

"Some of these cost $25 or $30 in the summer," the 57-year-old Detroiter said Sunday, holding up a coral-pink book bag with LED lights embedded within. "If you go in the fall or winter, they're only $3."

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For more than a decade, Martin, an assembly line worker at Ford, has been collecting school supplies for Detroit children and handing them out from her home on Dresden near 7 Mile Road, on the city's east side.

The idea germinated in 2003, when she and friend Priscilla Brown were working at American Axle in Hamtramck. The duo had heard about an initiative in the suburbs to fill a bus with school supplies for students in Oakland County.

'Why were the kids in Detroit, or more specifically our neighborhoods, not getting access to giveaways like this?' they wondered. With the help of their union, Local 235, Martin and Brown organized a school supply drive and gave away classroom necessities on campuses across the city. In 2009, after Axle shuttered its doors and laid off its employees, the friends decided to keep the initiative going.

For the past eight years they have been collecting supplies on their own, each August setting up a "shop" in front of Martin's house where kids could stop by to grab what they needed before the new school year.

Sunday was the giveaway for the 2017-18 school year. Over the course of the hot afternoon — the second to last weekend before most schools start back up — families from across the city made their way to Martin's east side home.

It was a day that highlighted some very real inequities and challenges that continue to persist in the city's neighborhoods. Issues that range from poverty and violence to unemployment and blight.

It was also, however, an opportunity to conquer and put to rest many of the assumptions that come with these adversities. This wasn't a day about charity, but rather enriching a neighborhood.

It was a day that showcased the everyday heroes, like Martin, who strive to maintain community and camaraderie on city blocks that refuse to disband — blocks that have weathered some of the toughest years in Detroit and continue, despite it all, to rise to the occasion, and then some.

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Set-up for the event was a family affair — the lesson being it is never too early to start helping your community. Martin's grandchildren Darren Shaw, 14, and Steven Martin, 7, carried boxes of flashy backpacks and translucent rules from the house to the front yard. Cousins Ka'Ronn Henderson, 16, and D'Aareyon Pope, 18, carefully laid out the new products.

"I was fortunate enough to have all this stuff, I just want to come out to support the people that don't," said Pope, who just graduated from Grosse Pointe North this past summer. He said he had lived in Detroit until he was in the fourth grade when his house burned down, and he moved out of the city. This was his first time helping Martin.

As the boys began to configure the set-up, Martin's son Steven, 37, helped to put up balloons.

"My mom has been doing stuff like this for years," the 37-year-old said, as his wife, Monica, bounced their 2-year-old son in her arms.

Surveying the street, Monica Martin explained that this was a neighborhood where she used to mow the lawn as a kid because it was known as a well-to-do, middle-class neighborhood where you could "make money" by helping with lawn care or snow removal. Today, boarded-up houses and empty lots dominate.

"It's only a hood when you make it a hood, but when you make it a neighborhood it's something beautiful," she said, glancing at her mother-in-law. "Anita makes it a neighborhood."

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Around 12:30 p.m., Monique Blanton, the daughter of Martin's friend and former co-worker Priscilla Brown, arrived. The coach of a local dance team, Blanton brought her daughter and five dancers to help with the day. Students in Detroit and neighboring Grosse Pointe, the kids, ranging in ages from 11 to 15, were eager to help.

"We're here for community service," Blanton's 14-year-old daughter Mikayla Torrence explained, as she showed her friends what to put in each backpack.

"It feels good to know the community can get all they need for free," said fellow dancer Cassidy Wadley, 11.

As kids began to arrive, the girls grabbed the younger children by the hands and led them down the line, helping them pick out grade-appropriate supplies.

"Please, please, please, let the kids pick out what they want," Martin told the group and some of the parents who showed up with their children. "If it's a boy and they want a pink binder, let them! It should be kids' choice."

Chawntae Stewart steered a crew of seven kids down Dresden Street toward Martin's house. Smiling as she approached a table filled with back-to-school supplies, the 38-year-old told the kids to grab what they wanted.

"This is just a bubbly place, it makes you feel good," Stewart announced, explaining that the kids weren't her own, but rather her neighbors.

"I drove by and as soon as I saw this was happening, I ran to get them," she said, noting that for nearly a decade she had come by Martin's for school supplies for her own kids.

"As a single mom with six kids, this took a load off, I don't know what I would have done," Stewart said, getting suddenly quieter.

Pointing to a pin on the front of her gray sweatsuit, she explained that earlier this month her daughter, 14-year-old Jamesha McWilliams, was killed, just down the road, in a drive-by shooting. The teen had just made her high school cheer squad and had been excited about starting school.

Shaking her head Stewart began to smile, looking at the neighborhood kids she has just brought to Martin's.

"I am going through a lot," she said. "But it makes me happy to see good things, especially when I'm going through this."

As Stewart was explaining how happy the giveaway made her, a car pulled up in front of the house.

"How can I donate?" Robert Taylor, 33, asked. The father of a 9- and 4-year-old said he had just gone school shopping for his kids the week prior. He was just driving to the grocery store but was so moved by the act of kindness he wanted to get out.

"This is beautiful," he said, handing Martin a dollar bill. "Keep this up."

While Martin was initially reticent about continuing the giveaway — even telling the Detroit Free Press's Jim Schaefer last year that she didn't think she could continue doing it due to the physical strains it put on her body — looking around at the people that appreciated her work, the kids who depended on her, and the family members that would help her put it together, she knew she'd be back for the 2018-19 school year.

"How could I not?" she asked.