Working with seniors in need recommended by The Good People Fund, The Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, Selfhelp Community Services and The Blue Card, Inc., Family-to-Family has launched a new effort to provide monthly groceries for elderly and impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the U.S. Of the approximately 100,000 Holocaust survivors living here, an estimated one-third live in profound poverty. F-to-F’s new one on one sponsorship program links each participating donor with one senior in need, and for either a $55 monthly donation or a $27.50 monthly donation (for a shared sponsorship), will provide that senior with a monthly gift card to a local grocery store.  Forty-four have been sponsored so far! Learn more or sign up here.

In an expansion of our regular Sponsor A Family program, Family-to-Family has linked up 49 refugee families who are recent arrivals to the U.S. with monthly sponsors.  The program, launched last year, is an effort to help refugee families that are already in the U.S. but can’t yet support themselves. Each sponsored family is provided with a monthly grocery gift card enabling them to purchase basic grocery staples at a grocery store in their neighborhood. Recommended to our program by several national refugee resettlement agencies located in the New York City and upstate New York area, these families – fleeing violence, war and persecution –  have emigrated from 20 countries – Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Chad, China, Cuba, El Salvador, Eritrea, Guatemala, Guinea, Honduras, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Libya, Mexico, Peru, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Sponsors provide a monthly donation to Family-to-Family which allow us to purchase the grocery gift cards, and can also send “their” family other basic essentials through the mail. Our goal is to help these individuals and families, who have already endured so much, feel welcome and secure in their new country. Learn more here.

February is a great month to purge! Our Hastings on Hudson, N.Y. office is filling up with bags of gently used kids clothes with many items almost brand new! A great way to engage your kids in giving back is to spend a few hours together going through their closets and drawers and “sharing your bounty.”  If you live near any of our F-to-F sites– we have a place for you to bring your items! Email us for more info.

Family-to-Family is thrilled to welcome families referred by Westhab, Inc. – Yonkers’ largest homeless services agency – into our Sponsor A Family program. Westhab is a large not-for-profit provider of housing and social services for homeless and low-income families in Westchester County and our Sponsor A Family program will supplement a their growing food pantry program. Family-to-Family is headquartered in the town next to Yonkers, and our new relationship with Westhab will allow us to expand our reach locally, serving a greater number of our own neighbors in need. We’re starting with eight Yonkers families and will be adding more in the coming months. We’ve also been steering donations of adult and children’s clothing, children’s books, school supplies and beauty products to Westhab families. Interested in sponsoring a family? Click here.

With over 150 children from 16 communities across the U.S. enrolled in One Book At A Time, we’re thrilled to be adding even more children from a new site – The Museum School in Yonkers, N.Y. Five new OBAAT elementary school kids will receive their first book from their assigned book “buddy” this fall. OBAAT’s mission is to provide a personal connection between a donor family with enough to share and a book-loving child in need. OBAAT donors buy and send one new book every month to the child they are matched with along with a letter, providing “their” child with that wonderful feeling of book ownership. Seventy-nine percent of students at The Museum School qualify for free or reduced lunch through the National Free Lunch Program. With household budgets stretched to provide food and basic necessities, buying books is usually out of the question.
To learn more or to sponsor a child click HERE.

Join the annual national tribute to the victims of 9/11 and be a part of the 9/11 Day of Service!

Our Day of Service project this year is “Stuffed Shirts for the Homeless,” a project that provides the homeless with much needed personal care items. Read more here and join us!

Help a child start the school year off right!  Join our annual summer backpack drive and send a backpack filled with school supplies to a child in need. Learn more.

Together with Red Bird Mission in Beverly, KY we’re excited to announce the opening of the new “Gap” Pantry.  Intended to help the working poor, who aren’t eligible for Red Bird’s regular food pantry, the Gap Pantry provides families with incomes just above the poverty line with fresh groceries, including dairy items, fruit and vegetables, every month. A sponsorship for one gap family is only $10 a month!  Read more here.

This picture speaks a thousand words! Thanks to a super industrious high-school student from Lyndhurst, Ohio participating in F-to-F’s Stuffed Shirt Project, two nonprofit agencies serving impoverished and homeless children were happily inundated over the holidays with personal care items, warm clothing and more.

As part of his school community service requirement, teenager Richard M. handed out more than 150 flyers publicizing his collection project, and then picked up, organized and delivered over 500 (!) collected items.

His trove of donations included soaps, shampoo, shaving cream, razors, toothbrushes, toothpaste, tissues, deodorant, warm jackets, snowsuits, blankets, wool socks, boots, towels, toys and much more.

When we first had the idea for our Birthday Giving Project back in 2006, we never dreamed it would catch on the way it has! Since then, more than 9,000 children in need from 39 states across the U.S. have received one of our birthday boxes… made by hand by thousands of children and adults at birthday giving parties, office give-back days, bar and bat mitzvahs, scouting events and more. But many more are needed! Please email us to learn how you can make a “birthday in a box” for a child living in poverty.

Looking for a meaningful way to get your teenager involved with “giving back?” Have them start an F-to-F club and bring our empathy based projects into their high school. Four seniors at the Hastings on Hudson, NY High School are launching the first F-to-F school club this fall, starting with a project to collect gently used teen clothing that will be sold at a “pop-up” shop to support Family-to-Family. Future projects include work at the local food pantry. To learn more about ways your teen call get involved email us at kids@family-to-family.org.

Kids at the YMCA in Newark, New Jersey took part in a “day of giving,” at the end of the summer thanks to the efforts of one fourth grade girl from Rockaway Township (also N.J.)  With the help of her teacher at Stony Brook Elementary School, the fourth grader organized a book drive that collected a whopping six hundred gently used children‘s books for Family-to-Family’s GivingWorks Empathy Project. The books, along with 125 backpacks donated by the same student, were delivered to the Newark YMCA, where preteen and teenage kids living in poverty participated in a GivingWorks event – choosing books to read to.. and then give to… younger children in need. We call this double giving!

As part of a major community service effort in December and January, 190 employees from WebMD in several U.S. cities took part in F-to-F’s “Bath Pack” project, putting together an impressive 950 personal care item kits for struggling families in need. 120 employees in Indianapolis (Indiana) and another 70 in Portland (Oregon) assembled the kits, which each included shampoo, soap, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, a comb and a list of WebMD wellness tips. The hygiene products for the kits were donated by High Ridge Brands, MetLife Dental Division, Hillsboro Implants & Periodontics, WebMD Cares and SC Johnson.

Completed “bath packs” were delivered to local social service organizations.

In addition, WebMD employees volunteered at the Portland Rescue Mission to serve breakfast to over 150 homeless, where they distributed more of the personal care item kits.

Catherine Daniel, a Senior Manager of Public Relations for WebMD, explained that the project, “was an opportunity for WebMD to provide those in need with the everyday tools to maintain their hygiene, thus encouraging overall mental and physical health and wellness.”

A group of employee “angels” at Dannon in White Plains, N.Y. put together a whopping 270 “dinners in a bag” for impoverished local families over the holiday season. Using Family-to-Family’s “Let’s Do Dinner!” project as a template, Dannon chefs provided recipes for healthy dinners to Dannon employees, who then shopped for the recipe ingredients and assembled the bags during several half-hour “meal packing competitions.”

A group of employee “angels” at Dannon in White Plains, N.Y. put together a whopping 270 “dinners in a bag” for impoverished local families over the holiday season. Using Family-to-Family’s “Let’s Do Dinner!” project as a template, Dannon chefs provided recipes for healthy dinners to Dannon employees, who then shopped for the recipe ingredients and assembled the ingredients into bags during several half-hour “meal packing competitions.”  Each bag contained all ingredients needed for a full meal for a family of five, plus a copy of the printed recipe.  The bags were delivered to six Westchester County, N.Y. nonprofits that work with families in need (all affiliated with the social services agency Westhab, Inc.), enabling local families to cook a healthy dinner meal from a new recipe!

In an ongoing effort to help local families in need, employees from Stew Leonards grocery store in Yonkers, New York took part in another Family-to-Family project over the holidays (in the past they’ve participated in both our summer backpack and children’s book drives).  This time store team members put together baskets of holiday groceries for families in need through F-to-F’s Holiday Dinner Baskets project.  The baskets were delivered to the nearby Hastings on Hudson, N.Y. community food pantry, where they were given out to some of the 30 families the pantry serves each month.

“Had a great day stuffing t-shirts… This project was a great choice for us!” Carol Vigorito of Keller Williams Realty and her company’s team of realtors in Queens, New York made and donated 121 “Stuffed Shirts” at their annual “Red Day” giving event on May 14th. 

The t-shirts, which were filled with basic hygiene items like shampoo, soap and toothpaste, were delivered to Queens Community House, where they’ll be given out to families struggling with poverty.