Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

In my series on what charities the stars support, I am going to talk about a younger actress who has been very busy this past year. She was featured in the Hunger Games and The Silver Linings Playbook , for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress. She’s also a very kind and compassionate young woman.  Last month, Lawrence was part of the Silver Linings Playbook’s support of the Glenholme School, a therapeutic boarding school for students with special needs.  Growing up, Jennifer was friends with Andy Strunk, who has Down syndrome. They met at church and then became close friends in Kammerer Middle School where she helped him get the title of being “Mr. Kammerer” at the school. She’s also part of a fundraiser for the Kenny Gordon Foundation which funds research regarding sudden cardiac death caused by arrhythmias, scholarships, and a camp for children.  Going on through March 27, you can bid in an online auction through CharityBuzz to do a ...

My son’s heart was broken a little a couple of weeks ago in his efforts to try and help others. Our church has been digging wells for communities in Zimbabwe.   The Children’s Ministry decided that it would be good for the children to “own” their own well by raising the money to dig it.   Great idea. I’m all for getting kids involved in charity.   So, they were selling water at the Sunday services for a couple of weeks. Then, they decided to send “wells” home with the students in which they could collect money.   These were little boxes covered in crumpled up brown paper with handles on them. (I think they were Chinese food boxes.   Only heaven knows how they came up with enough of them for all the kids.)   Christopher’s Sunday school teacher also had some bean seeds and gave them to the students so they could grow beans and sell them. That Sunday Chris came home from Sunday school so excited. We had brought a couple of his friends to church that day a...

As my first blog for my own website, I felt I should explain a little bit about how I got to this point. Since August of 2010, I have been blogging about volunteering and charity work for Working Mother Magazine’s website. I call it the Heart to Heart blog because I believe that helping others is a heart matter. When we help others, we connect hearts. We may never see the fruit of our heart work, but it is there in the heart of the recipient.   That is why I chose to call this blog Helping Hearts. We are hearts that help other hearts when we reach out to others through volunteer or charity work. I am a writer who has written for newspapers, websites and magazines since 2002, but I found that there was a particular type of article I was writing that I felt was more important than the others, that had more meaning.   I was writing features about teachers, volunteers and other inspiring people who gave of themselves without expecting a payback. They reminded me of how I wan...