The Kao Family

In honor of Family Volunteer Day, Nov. 23, Points of Light and Disney are recognizing families with the Daily Point of Light Award. Meet today’s winning family, the Kaos of Texas, and nominate someone in your community.

In the mid-1990s, when Mandy Kao began overseeing a number of apartment properties, she was troubled to discover that many tenants – often immigrants and refugees – were struggling with poverty, surrounded by crime and drugs.

Mandy her husband, William, quickly took action. The couple, who own a real estate development and management company in Houston, created after-school programs for kids in all the apartment buildings they managed. Mandy helped kids with homework and gave them snacks, while William took boys to ballgames and other activities. The couple also began contributing to area charities that supported children, immigrants, low-income families and the homeless.

“William and I started using our business as a ministry of love,” says Mandy.

Mandy, an immigrant herself born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada, wanted to do more to help break cycles of poverty in Houston. Five years ago, she created the Mandy Kao Foundation to expand on the work she and William had started and also to leave a legacy that would teach the importance of giving to their three sons, Tyler, Ethan and Ashton.

“Love and giving are very important things to pass on to my children,” says Mandy. “I can give them an education and money, but a loving heart is the greatest gift because that’s what will give them happy lives.”

While the mostly self-funded Mandy Kao Foundation donates to a wide range of civic-oriented charities throughout the Houston area, it focuses on supporting children and young adults and helping struggling adults to become self-sufficient. The foundation has also expanded its after-school program, launched a college scholarship fund and organized an annual “free bookstore” aimed at keeping kids reading during the summer by letting them choose up to 10 books to take home. Thousands of children have benefited from these programs.

Mandy has a special interest in helping girls and young women, and offers programs for them directly through the foundation and by partnering with Girls Inc. of Greater Houston, a nonprofit that participates in the foundation’s after-school programs.

The foundation’s outreach to the immigrant and refugee communities includes partnership with Asian American Family Services, where Mandy has created her own classes in art and etiquette for middle school girls. The foundation also started several projects at a local refugee resettlement agency, including one to find careers for women with tailoring skills.

All three of the Kao children are active in the Mandy Kao Foundation. Tyler, 13, even sits on the board. He and brothers Ethan, 11, and Ashton, 8, help out with existing foundation programs, but also launched one of their own. By offering to donate the money they would have spent on Christmas presents, and by setting up a lemonade stand to bring in more money, the boys won a matching grant from the school district that enabled the foundation to build a playground at Treasure Forest Elementary School. This project was Tyler’s favorite.

“It made me feel great,” says Tyler. “There were young boys and girls with no playground. They were playing in the mud. It was fun to see them enjoying the new playground when it was finished.”

Adds Ethan, “My favorite was giving money from a lemonade stand to Angie’s Angels, which helps pets. But I enjoy all of the work. It makes me feel good to see smiles on people’s faces.”

Ashton recently recruited some of his friends to make sandwiches and collect socks for the homeless.

“It made me feel generous,” says Ashton, “but I feel bad that there are still so many people who don’t have enough.”

The Miscoe Family

In honor of Family Volunteer Day, Nov. 23, Points of Light and Disney are recognizing families with the Daily Point of Light Award. Meet today’s winning family, the Miscoes of Texas, and nominate someone in your community.

A rowdy dog led the Miscoe family to volunteer service.

It’s a story they like to tell. Ten years ago, a dog in the family’s Georgetown, Texas, neighborhood was making such a nuisance of itself – running around on its own and digging in people’s lawns – that the dog’s owner was eventually fined. As an alternative to paying the fine, he was offered the chance to perform community service at Round Rock Area Serving Center, which includes a food pantry and meal service for seniors.

The neighbor thought the Miscoe kids might enjoy coming along, so he invited them. The three eldest Miscoe children, Kelsey, Kenton and Alaina, took him up on the offer.

The kids loved the experience and kept going back. When their younger siblings Isabel and Lyndsey got older, they volunteered as well. All these years later, the five Miscoe children remain active volunteers at the center and the two thrift stores that help support it. Together, they have logged almost 10,000 volunteer hours.

The Round Rock Area Serving Center, which runs the HandsOn Network affiliate The Volunteer Center, has ongoing drives to collect food for its pantry, which serves more than 20,000 households a year; a fundraising program that enables the pantry to purchase fresh food from a local food bank; a program called HOPE that delivers meals to seniors in need; and the thrift stores. The nonprofit also helps low-income families pay utility bills and runs an annual event to provide coats and other warm clothing to kids.

Over the years, the Miscoe children have volunteered for virtually every activity at the center, from loading trucks to operating cash registers, from delivering meals to seniors to repairing electronic appliances for the thrift store, from raising money to training new volunteers.

“Working in the thrift stores is probably my favorite way to volunteer,” says Isabel, 15. “It’s not only fun, but the things we sell are of high quality, so it’s an ingenious way to fund the food pantry.”

The stores are critical. Between January and October of 2012, for example, they raised almost $225,000 of the $850,000 the Serving Center spent on clients during that period.

“Before I volunteered, I had not realized how many people don’t have the simple things in life,” says Isabel. “Watching the success of the Serving Center makes me want to stay involved in community service. I think if anyone has the chance to help in the community, they should run with it.”

Kenton, 20, who is now a student at Harvard, still returns to volunteer at the Serving Center during school breaks.

“I like the hands-on work,” he says. “Loading and unloading the truck is my favorite thing. And I love working with HOPE. I’ve been doing that for 10 years, so some of the seniors I deliver to are now longtime friends.”

Kenton says the Serving Center has turned him into a lifetime volunteer. When he entered Harvard, he immediately started looking for community service opportunities in Cambridge and volunteered for a mentoring program.

Mother Kelly Miscoe is proud that her kids developed their love of volunteerism all on their own.

“They’re a wonderful bunch,” says Kelly. “Long after I’m gone from this earth, they’ll still be volunteering. I’m so happy they found a place where they are needed.”

The Jack Family

In honor of Family Volunteer Day, Nov. 23, Points of Light and Disney are recognizing families with the Daily Point of Light Award. Meet today’s winning family, the Jacks of Massachusetts, and nominate someone in your community.

After the birth of her daughter, Lizzie, in 2002, Heather Jack wanted to become more involved in the community. She hoped her daughter, as she got older, would follow suit. The mom worried that kids were growing up more focused on themselves than others.

“There seems to be an increased desire among youth to become independently rich and famous, as young people seem to become more and more entrenched in their own secluded ‘iPod culture,’” says Heather.

In order to help reconnect young people with the larger community and to tap into kids’ “natural capacity for empathy and idealism,” as Heather puts it, she founded The Volunteer Family. Heather began by meeting with parents and teachers in her own community of Ashland, Mass. Her mission was to help connect kids with service learning opportunities in their own neighborhoods. In 10 years, The Volunteer Family has grown into a national network that helps 20,000 children, parents and teachers identify and engage kids in local volunteer opportunities.

As Heather broadened her work with The Volunteer Family beyond Ashland, she often met teachers who faced a common problem: Even if students were willing – or required by their schools – to do community service work, it was difficult to find programs that were fun and meaningful to them.

In 2009, to address this challenge, Heather authored her own 300-page curriculum, Future Philanthropists, a hands-on course in philanthropy for middle school and high school students. The program, which is supported by two foundations and an annual fundraising appeal, teaches kids the essentials of philanthropy and how the nonprofit sector works. Students make their own visits to assess local charities and collectively decide where to make donations of $5,000 to $10,000. Since Future Philanthropists started, it has enabled 670 students in 58 locations to allocate $400,000 to community charities of their own choosing.

Today, both Lizzie, now 11, and son Alex, 8, are active participants in The Volunteer Family. Lizzie has helped her mother arrange a number of events and has initiated projects of her own.

“When I was in third grade, there was an earthquake in Haiti, and I collected 300 bars of soap to send them,” says Lizzie. “It made me happy because I was helping complete strangers. And I enjoyed it because I was not just donating money, but doing something creative.”

Alex, who has been helping The Volunteer Family for two years, says he “likes giving away stuff.”

“This year, I took all my toys from my birthday party and gave them to the food pantry, where other children would get them,” says Alex. “I was happy about it because I thought they would enjoy them more than me.”

Husband and father Phil is an active volunteer himself in Ashland, where he serves on the Affordable Housing Council, Affordable Housing Trust and the Conservation Commission. He’s proud of his wife’s work in the community and beyond. “It’s a very nice feeling to see what she’s accomplished,” he says.

As The Volunteer Family grows, and becomes too large for one family to oversee, Heather is working to ensure its sustainability by merging many of its programs with those of Doing Good Together, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit.

“I’m happy that I’ve been able to make a contribution,” says Heather. “But mainly, I hope I’ve been able to help teach other people to have an impact. I think it’s very important to find your passions and talents, and align those to benefit others.”

The Konkel Family

In honor of Family Volunteer Day, Nov. 23, Points of Light and Disney are recognizing families with the Daily Point of Light Award. Meet today’s winning family, the Konkels of Illinois, and nominate someone in your community.

An accidental discovery launched the Konkel family of eight on a journey of community service.

It started about five years ago, when Shawn Konkel, the mom, happened upon a building called Maywood Fine Arts in the economically struggling town of Maywood, outside Chicago. Curiosity led her inside, where she discovered children’s tumbling classes in session. She learned that Lois and Ernie Baumann had been teaching dance there for 25 years.

She also learned that in 1996, with help from the community, the Baumanns had created the nonprofit Maywood Fine Arts Association to combat escalating local rates of drug activity, gang involvement and teen pregnancy by offering kids exposure to the fine and performing arts through affordable classes in dance, art, music, drama and karate. Some former students had gone on to perform with the New York City Ballet and the Rockettes.

Shawn, who had studied dance for 15 years, was instantly enchanted by Maywood Fine Arts and became a volunteer.

“From that moment, everything changed in my life,” Shawn told FamilyFun Magazine last year. “I realized one place could bring so much good into the world.”

Soon, every member of the Konkel family was involved with the organization. Shawn, who runs a promotional product business, creates and sells custom clothing bearing the Maywood Fine Arts logo; all proceeds go to the association. With help from the whole family, Shawn also spends many hours planning and coordinating the annual Pumpkin Patch Parade, in which Maywood Fine Arts students perform for the public.

Shawn’s husband, Don, volunteers as a handyman for Maywood Fine Arts. The Konkels’ eldest children, Joe, 21, and Nellie, 19, assist with association rehearsals and productions. Two of their kids, son J.D., 12, and Margueritte, 10, attend courses at Maywood Fine Arts and also help sell their mother’s promotional clothing. Even the two youngest Konkel kids, Jack, 6, and Jett, 5, help set up productions and clean up afterward.

In 2010, a fire damaged the studio where Maywood Fine Arts teaches dance. While Maywood temporarily teaches its dance classes in a church, the Konkels are hard at work raising funds to repair the studio. The family even produced a fundraising benefit that featured 20 dancers from the Chicago area.

Nellie says she is proud she can play even a small part in helping Maywood Fine Arts, which she describes as “such a little miracle.”

“The founders, Ernie and Lois, literally dedicated every minute they have to the organization,” says Nellie. “The magic that happens there is just something indescribable. And when you see something like that, you can’t help but to get involved.”

The Bangilan Family

In honor of Family Volunteer Day, Nov. 23, Points of Light and Disney are recognizing families with the Daily Point of Light Award. Meet today’s winning family, the Bangilans of North Carolina, and nominate someone in your community.

When the Bangilans volunteer, they like to get dirty.

Since moving to North Carolina two years ago, the family of four – parents Rod and Serina and sons Kevin, 8, and Crisanto, 2 – has volunteered many hours at the Raleigh City Farm, composting, staking plants, and harvesting fruits and vegetables used to feed the community’s hungry.

The Bangilans have also volunteered through the local volunteer center Activate Good, a HandsOn Network affiliate. Through Activate Good, the family has helped with the Wilders Grove Project, which transforms recyclable material into public art, and with planting gardens at local elementary schools.

“My grandparents first taught me the value of giving,” says Serina, a full-time mom. “I’ve been volunteering regularly since my teens because I was taught to put other people first. It’s something I still believe in because I’ve witnessed that whenever I give, it always comes back to me. I want my kids to understand and experience that.”

Years before moving to North Carolina, Serina earned a master’s degree in childhood education and volunteered more than 1,400 hours of classroom teaching. She was also a volunteer tutor and active participant in many civic organizations in New York.

Rod, who works as a coding supervisor for Duke Health System, says Serina is the most active volunteer in the family, but he joins her whenever he has the time.

“I try to be as active as I can, but Serina takes the lead,” says Rod. “Helping people is everyone’s responsibility, and I believe we should do it without expecting anything in return. I want our children to learn the virtue of giving at a very young age.”

And while the Bangilans’ toddler is too young to appreciate the meaning of volunteer service, their older son already sees its value. This year, Kevin joined his parents in working on both the art project and school gardening, and says he plans to continue volunteering with his mom and dad.

“I’m glad I did it,” says Kevin. “The gardening was kind of hard because it was a hot day. But it makes people feel good to have others around them who are helping to do stuff.”

Serina sums it up this way: “The main driving force behind my family’s desire to volunteer is the word ‘hope.’ Our dreams are not dreams without others. My dreams include helping others in some way because I believe that it is the secret to my happiness. When I contribute in making the world a better place, I in turn feel safer and at peace within.”

The Silverstein Family

In honor of Family Volunteer Day, Nov. 23, Points of Light and Disney are recognizing families with the Daily Point of Light Award. Meet today’s winning family, the Silversteins of New York, and nominate someone in your community.

Natalie and Jonathan Silverstein have built a family tradition out of Jewish tradition.

It started four years ago when Natalie and older daughter Emilia – 8 at the time – began volunteering at the homeless shelter run by their synagogue, Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York City. The eight-bed shelter provides temporary housing to men who have been referred by city agencies. Many have jobs or go to school, but simply lack a place to live.

“Once per school semester, we work an all-night shift with another volunteer family,” says Natalie. “We always work with two teams of one adult and one child. Sometimes the kids will bake cookies for the men, or sit in the lounge and watch television with them. But mainly we’re all there to be available in case the men need anything. It’s a great opportunity to teach the kids about service.”

Performing mitzvahs, or good and charitable acts, is a central part of Judaism, and it’s what drives the Silverstein family to serve others together.

Since the Silversteins began volunteering at the men’s shelter, their son Archie, now 10, has grown old enough to participate. Now Natalie spends two nights a school semester at the shelter, one with Emilia and one with Archie.

Emilia, now 12, says she both enjoys and appreciates the importance of her volunteer time.

“We need to help, but it’s also nice seeing other people benefit from our charity work,” says Emilia. “If you were in a bad position, you’d want someone else to help get you out of that dark place. I think community service is now a part of my life.”

Spring 2013 marked the 30th year of the men’s shelter, and during the school year leading up to the anniversary, Natalie volunteered many hours speaking about the shelter’s importance to parents of kids attending Rodeph Sholom School, where the Silverstein children are students. Because of Natalie’s efforts, 15 new families volunteered to work at the shelter.

In order to help people find even more family-friendly volunteer opportunities, Natalie became active this year in Doing Good Together, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit devoted to inspiring families to get involved in community service. In September, Natalie became the New York-area coordinator for Doing Good Together, and has already signed up 200 subscribers for her monthly e-mail newsletter, which alerts local families to volunteer opportunities such as planting trees in parks, sending birthday cards to the elderly and donating candy to U.S. troops.

“It’s another thing I do because it’s so hard to find service work for young kids,” says Natalie. “Children are born with loving hearts, but parents need to model moral values for their children, and work to get them interested in making large and small differences in the world.”

While the Silversteins’ youngest child, 5-year-old daughter Alaina, is still too young to help at the men’s shelter, she’s already learning the value of mitzvahs, Natalie says. Alaina participates each year when the family of five visits a homebound elderly couple – Holocaust survivors – to light their Hannukah candles for them.

Sandra Ahlhorn and Amy Barnes

Sandra Ahlhorn and Amy Barnes, longtime friends and mothers of school-age kids, were disturbed to learn last year that children from low-income families in their city of Houston suffer a “summer slide.” During the school break, the kids start forgetting what they had learned during the school year – often because they don’t have books at home to read.

Over time, such setbacks can lead to vast achievement gaps between children from lower- and higher-income families.

Ahlhorn and Barnes, who had long been active volunteers at their kids’ schools, joined together to found Books Between Kids, hoping initially just to make a small difference by holding book drives and soliciting book donations through social media.

“We just wanted to help,” says Ahlhorn. “I was raised in a reading environment, and so were my kids. It was painful for me to realize that in so many homes, books are a luxury that parents simply can’t afford. And studies clearly show that the absence of home reading leads to lower test scores and impacts how long a child will stay in school.”

When Ahlhorn and Barnes started out, the two decided to target prekindergarten and elementary school children. Their first goal was to collect enough gently used books to help kids at six local schools. Barnes asked for donations from Better World Books, an online business that sells used books. The socially responsible company has raised more than $15 million for literacy and distributed millions of free books to charities worldwide.

Better World Books responded in a way that stunned Barnes and Ahlhorn: It gave Books Between Kids 70,000 books, delivered by an 18-wheeler.

“Better World Books changed everything,” says Barnes. “Suddenly, we were looking at helping 20-plus schools instead of six, and we needed volunteers simply to deal with the volume. But by using social media outreach, we were able to recruit more than a 100 volunteers pretty quickly.”

Ahlhorn, Barnes and their team set about the months-long task of unpacking books, vetting and sorting them, and repacking them for delivery to schools. Over the course of the school year, 30,000 additional books were donated through local drives.

“The community deserves great credit as well,” says Barnes. “We received many books because of the involvement of Scout troops and other organizations. One youngster gathered 170 books on his own.”

“Kids played a big part in getting local book donations, and that is fundamental,” adds Ahlhorn. “When we started Books Between Kids, we wanted kids to learn more about helping the community by participating: kids giving to kids.”

In May, Books Between Kids delivered books to 22 Houston schools, where they were distributed to students just before summer break.

“Many of the schools held events when they gave out the books,” says Barnes. “It was lovely to hear from principals and parents. They told us the children were very excited and couldn’t believe that they got to take six books home with them.”

Better World Books has agreed to send two truckloads of books to Books Between Kids this school year and for the next two years.

“We’re poised to grow,” says Ahlhorn. “This is a huge school district, and 90,000 kids qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches. That’s how many kids we’d like to reach. We don’t want to force ourselves to grow too quickly, but so far we’ve accomplished things we never planned.”

Sean Egan

At age 5, Sean Egan lost his father, a New York fire captain, on 9/11. As a teenager, he came to appreciate how veterans, too, risked their lives for the well-being of others.

“I believe in the American way of life,” says Egan, 18, a senior at Monsignor Farrell High School on Staten Island. “The 9/11 attacks helped to unify our country, but a lot of people were and are afraid that it could happen again. I believe the reason it hasn’t happened again is the dedicated work of our servicemen and women, and I wanted to do something to honor and support them.”

After paying an informal visit to a veterans’ hospital in late 2011, Egan felt drawn by the veterans’ stories and their reaction to him – happy that someone cared enough to listen. He launched Hearing Our Heroes at his high school, and recruited 100 members in a year. Today, Hearing Our Heroes has 200 active members from Monsignor Farrell and another 100 from other Staten Island high schools.

By hosting fundraising events such as bake sales and clothing drives, the group has raised more than $35,000 in cash and in-kind donations, and a won a national grant from State Farm for $25,000.

Along with making regular visits to Veterans Affairs hospitals and Veterans of Foreign War posts, Hearing Our Heroes volunteers operate a snow shoveling service in the winter and a yard work service in the summer to help Staten Island veterans who are unable to tend to those chores because of advanced age or disabilities.

In 2012, 19 Hearing Our Heroes volunteers traveled by bus to Washington, D.C., to visit injured veterans at Walter Reed hospital.

This past summer, Hearing Our Heroes won national media attention for its outreach to the Akbar family. Army Private Rasheed Akbar was deployed in Kuwait when one of his daughters was diagnosed with cancer. He was able to return to the U.S. for only three weeks while his daughter had surgery. When his tour of duty was finally complete, Hearing Our Heroes threw a welcome home party for Akbar and his family at Staten Island’s Fort Wadsworth and revealed that the group was sending the entire family on an all-expenses-paid trip to Disney World.

As Egan looks ahead to attending college next year, he and his fellow volunteers are training younger students to keep Hearing Our Heroes active at Monsignor Farrell High School, but he also wants to see the group expand.

“There’s no doubt that wherever I go to college, I’ll start the program there,” says Egan, who will join fellow volunteers to host a Veterans Day luncheon at a V.A. hospital in Brooklyn. “Groups like this should be everywhere.”