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. Last year we served 1600 students in 27 schools in Kansas City, KS and Shawnee Mission, KS school districts. This year we continue to do great things by serving 855 children in 15 schools!
  • 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 15 of our schools, and set up free clothing “stores” as needs dictate.
  • BOOKMOBILE/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.
  • FAMILY PACKS: 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.