we strive to feed the children’s minds, hearts, and souls…

Hands to Hearts began in the Spring of 2009 with the goal of simply helping children. At that point it consisted of providing backpacks of nutritious, kid-friendly food for 150 inner-city children to take home from summer school on Fridays. When the school year began, we partnered with Harvesters BackSnack program (www.harvesters.org) to distribute 450 of these each week.The children take home backpacks of food from school on Friday and bring them back to be replenished again the following week, filling the gap on weekends when school lunches are unavailable.

Since our start up we have been blessed to add to our mission:

  • INCREASED NUMBERS: We work with Harvesters as the largest community partner in the metro area to serve 1600 students in 27 schools in Kansas City, KS, Kansas City, MO and Shawnee Mission, KS school districts.
  • CLOTHING DRIVE: In response to the need for warm winter clothing, we began an ongoing clothing drive and maintain in-school clothing closets for our BackSnack schools upon request, respond to clothing requests from all 23 of our schools, and set up free clothing “stores” as needs dictate.
  • BOOK DRIVE: H2H collects new and gently used books year round. The donated books are given to school libraries or directly to the children through our bookmobile.
  • PARTNER SCHOOL: In December, 2010, we began a partnership with Silver City Elementary in Kansas City, KS. We work with the school on special projects and provide reading tutors and school volunteers, trained through Kansas City, KS School District’s YouthFriends program. It is our hope that by working alongside other local groups and increasing our volunteer pool, this program can be expanded to other schools as well.
  • SUMMER FOOD PROGRAM: The need for food is even more critical in the summer when children do not have access to breakfast and lunch at school. H2H has been able to work with Harvesters on a new program designed to address these needs. We distributed BackSnacks to three KCK summer school programs, 3 local churches providing food directly to inner city children, and Boys and Girls Club of KCK. We provided food and other supplies directly to children and families at a Saturday Morning Market in a low-income apartment complex with residents that included refugee families and transient homeless families.

on the drawing board

  • Our bookmobile is about to hit the road! If you know of some place that could benefit, let us know!
  • Each week we provide 20 homeless packs to the KCK homeless liasion and 10 homeless packs to the SMSD homeless liasion. Click here to help!

Our greatest asset, volunteers with willing hearts. Many, many people want to help, want to make a difference. We are blessed to be able to link these good-hearted volunteers with “our kids.” Join us.