Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

Since The Hunger Games movie came out in March, I’ve been featuring in my Today’s Ways to Help how you can fight hunger by taking a quiz from World Food Programme and Feeding America . Last October when I heard that Manna Food Bank , a local food bank in my area, was almost out of food, it didn’t occur to me that Hunger Action Month had been the month before in September. I just wanted to do something to help. Since 11/11/11 occurred last year and it happened to be my birthday, I had planned with another friend who shares that birthday to have a big shindig. We wanted to do something to benefit a worthy charity in lieu of gifts so we collected nonperishable food and money for Manna and another food bank. A couple of days after the party (after we had recovered), we brought the food to one food bank and I mailed a gift card to the other one. It was just a drop in the bucket but I’m sure it helped some people. This year I want to get the word out about Hunger Action Month ...

Have you ever wondered how charitable your neighbors are ?   Your town? Your state?   A new study by The Chronicle of Philanthropy compares tax returns of taxpayers who earned $50,000 or more in 2008 to determine their levels of giving. The trends were that those that had less gave more.   States that voted Republican in 2008 gave more.   People in states considered deeply religious gave more, too. As for volunteering, the statistics show that more than one in four Americans volunteer. The families studied gave $135 billion or almost two-thirds of the $214 billion donated by all individuals in 2008. Giving was calculated after major expenses like taxes, housing and food to level the playing field . The median charitable donation was 4.7 percent of discretionary income. The state with the highest percentage of giving was Utah at 10.6 percent.   The people of Utah also topped the chart for volunteering at a rate of f orty-five percent.   That’s almo...

This year if you were to visit a class of 40 students, on average by the end of the year ten of those 40 students will have dropped out of that school. In a school of two thousand students, that would be five hundred dropouts. Frightening numbers, aren’t they? General Colin Powell founded America’s Promise Alliance over a decade ago. In 2010, America’s Promise launched the Grad Nation campaign to fight back against the dropout trend.   According to the America’s Promise Alliance website: Grad Nation is a large and growing movement of dedicated individuals, organizations and communities working together to end America’s dropout crisis. Grad Nation goals include achieving a 90 percent graduation rate nationwide by 2020, with no high school graduating less than 80 percent of its students, and regaining America’s standing as first in the world in college completion.Grad Nation is a 10-year initiative focused on mobilizing Americans to end the dropout crisis and ensure that youn...

Yesterday my son and I went shopping for school clothes. You would have thought I was torturing him the way he complained. Florida also had a tax free weekend for school supplies and clothing last weekend. We had returned from being out of town that Sunday so we ran over to Walmart at 7 p.m. that night to get his composition books and pencils, too.   From my Facebook page, I can see that some of the children of my friends are already in school. My son starts next week. So, it’s time to start thinking of teachers, schedules and homework again. Amidst all the preparation, you will see boxes in major chain stores like Walmart asking for school supply donations for needy kids.   It’s an easy way to donate. Just pick up a few extra boxes of pencils and reams of paper at the same time you’re shopping for your own children while most of these items are on sale. However, there’s another group of kids who need supplies just as much as the older ones—preschoolers. We have a ...

I am ecstatic. My husband who has been in Kuwait for a year and in Birmingham the year before is BACK!   He’s been home for a little over a week. We went on a nearby base a couple of days ago and I stopped and got Slim Jims for the guys at the gate.   It’s something I started doing back during Random Acts of Kindness week in February. I bring them snacks since they’re on their feet outside for hours at a time.   He asked me why I did it and I said because I like to. Another great kindness event is coming up next Saturday, the Great Kindness Challenge .   It’s an event aimed at getting children involved in helping others, but it’s also a great day for everyone to do as many kind deeds as they can. If you’re having trouble thinking of some things your kids can do, the Great Kindness Challenge website has a list of 50 suggestions which you can print and check off as you do them.   They include things like leaving a flower on someone’s doorstep, reading a b...