Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

We recently moved to a new neighborhood. Our neighbors on one side are selling their house and haven’t talked to us one time. We met the neighbors on the other side within a week of moving, because our son was selling boy scout camp cards with coupons on them to help him raise money for summer camp. They didn’t buy a card, but they did welcome us to the neighborhood.  I’ve already written about how our old neighbors were so supportive of him and the new neighbors here were pretty great, too, buying cards and encouraging him to talk by asking him questions about scouting. Back in our old neighborhood, I had a habit of bringing cookies over to new neighbors, at least in the first few years of living there. Later, we had so many new neighbors that I stopped doing it. I think I also got tired with the apathy in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood had a community issue to deal with that never really got solved. We had a 55 year old sign in the front of the neighborhoo...

I often brainstorm topics to write about for this blog. I keep a list of over 250 ideas to which I am always adding. But sometimes I miss the obvious. Have you heard of Volunteers of America ? Neither had I, until today. It’s a Christian organization that’s been around since 1896. It provides help for homelessness, people with mental health problems, children, communities, veterans, those with disabilities or substance abuse problems and seniors. It also provides emergency services for people in crisis. As its name implies, it provides its ministry just in America. It provides services to more than two million people in over 400 communities in 46 states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. You can search for a local office near you at its website . I love its statement of Why We Do What We Do:   We are Volunteers of America. And we are the first to step forward, Taking on the most crushing problems. The dire. The hopeless. The untouchable. And we make a...

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...

What is summer really all about?   I think it’s about enjoying the good weather and spending time with those you love.   One way to do that is on summer vacations and I’ll write this month about Volunteer Vacations that you will be excited to try.   But another way to revel in long summer days and clear skies is do some playing around in your local parks. KaBOOM has made doing that even more pleasurable with the chance to win a weeklong trip to Washington, D.C .   But I’m not just writing about KaBOOM because of the contest. KaBOOM! is a national nonprofit that does lots of wonderful things in communities throughout the United States. KaBOOM provides grants for park equipment for playgrounds as well as tools for organization and fundraising for these playgrounds. It also sponsored an initiative to build playgrounds in hurricane ravaged areas affected by Hurricane Katrina and Rita and built over 130 playgrounds on the Gulf Coast. It encourages imaginativ...