School on Wheels strives to enhance educational opportunities for homeless children from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Catherine’s goal is to shrink the gaps in their education and provide them with the highest level of education possible. The School of Wheels program serves as a consistent support system to homeless students at a time of great stress and fear. School on Wheels brings the message to these students that they are cared about and important.
PEN Pals Book Club & Support Group for Children of Incarcerated Parents ("PEN Pals Book Club") was the brainchild of Olivia Stinson at the age of 14 years old. Olivia saw the need to embrace a special population while bringing together a church, a community and a city. The mission PEN Pals is to combat illiteracy among children of incarcerated parents and to provide mentors who offer them both encouragement and support on a regular basis.
NextStep Recycling works closely with local schools to help children and their parent, guardian, or sibling, learn how to use technology in a classroom-based setting. Lorraine applied her own experience with Asperger’s to others and discovered that for people who fall on the autism spectrum, the computer was very friendly and a great communication tool. She has turned a small, garage-based nonprofit into an internationally recognized organization that provides people with job and social skills training, refurbishes computers and recycles electronic waste.
The Sparkle Effect is an innovative, student-run program that helps students across the country create cheerleading and dance teams that include students with disabilities. Sarah founded The Sparkle Effect in 2008, and it continues to profoundly change the lives and outlooks of participating students with and without disabilities, replacing insecurity with confidence and joy. Generally, athletes are taught to perfect their skills, to conquer, to win. Sparkle Effect teams are not about perfection, they are about connection.
In 2003, Susan Runsvold set out to ensure that no child would have to experience a Christmas without any exciting gifts, an experience that she feared herself when she was young. Since then, her vision has expanded, as she discovered that bicycles can have a more profound impact on children's lives than she first imagined. These bikes bring children independence, confidence and a fun way to exercise. Today, TurningWheels For Kids distributes bikes not only at the holiday but also year round.
Furniture Sharehouse collects gently-used and new furniture from the general public and redistributes it free of charge to economically disadvantaged families, giving them the basic household furniture helping to rebuild their lives with dignity. Clients are referred by social service agencies, ensuring that the furniture goes directly to those who truly need it.
Ida has committed over 40 years to helping inner city children stay out of trouble by providing after school mentoring and activities. Her once small community center has grown tremendously. United Neighbors is a community-based agency that provides services in housing, youth programs, literacy and health education. It is also a HUD-certified local housing counseling agency and helps to stabilize neighborhoods through a home ownership program.
After Amy was diagnosed with Breast Cancer, she realized first-hand how difficult it was to organization child care for all of these critical care visits. Her experience led to the creation of My Little Waiting Room, a nonprofit offering drop in child care to the hospital. My Little Waiting Rooms mission is to promote the health and well-being of families by bringing drop-in child care to the hospital so that children can thrive as families heal. We figure since grocery stores, gyms, community centers and other locations offer this needed service, hospitals should too. Especially since families at the hospital are often in crisis and could really use the help.
After the death of Linda Wuestenberg’s son, Stevie in February of 2007 in a motor vehicle accident, Linda and her family worked to establish a nonprofit, Parent Grief. The Goal of their non-profit was to create legislation that established a Next of Kin database in Ohio.
The Next of Kin database is entirely voluntary where citizens can provide the Department of Motor Vehicles with emergency contact information of family members to be notified in the event of an emergency.
Because of Linda’s tireless efforts Law enforcement personal now have more resources to allow them to quickly contact a victim’s family in the event of an emergency. Most importantly fewer families have to go through what she had to experience when she had not been notified that her son was in ICU at a local hospital for over 7 hours because police and hospital personal were not able to locate Stevie’s next of kin. Unfortunately, those were some of Stevie’s last hours.
Jessica Carscadden a 4th Grader in San Diego lived in a Chinese Orphanage till the age of 5. Now in San Diego California Jessica has started a project called “We Care Bears”. The Aim of her project is to provide the Local Police and fire department bags of stuffed animals to keep in the trunks of the cars and on board the fire trucks, to give to kids they encounter, who may be scared or injured.
To date Jessica has been able to provide 100 plus bears to local emergency response units in San Diego, Poway and Rancho Santé Fe. Fire Trucks in Los Angeles are now being outfitted with teddy bears with a goal to equip all Orange County Response vehicles with stuffed animals.