“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read. There are only children who have not found the right book.” – Frank Serafini

David Vitter, Former U.S. Senator

kids Need Books and Resources

The Need– Millions of children from low-income communities don’t have the tools they need to learn and thrive. With your help, we can change this.

Books and resources impact everything from psychological well-being to academic performance, but kids in need don’t have that advantage. Books are critical and access to those resources is one of the greatest contributors to educational equity in the United States. Research shows that just the presence of books in the home improves educational outcomes.

Despite all this, books and resources are scarce for kids in need – meaning they are at a disadvantage from the start. It has been identified there are vast book deserts concentrated in low-income communities across the U.S. — with one community having only a single book to be shared among as many as 830 children.

How Does Poverty Effect Our Children?

Hope 4 kids is focused on youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility, by empowering kids to succeed in school and in life, through youth development and developing leadership skills in teens,

The Scale & the Impact. Poverty is reshaping education. Fifty-one percent of students across the nation’s public schools — 27 million children — are from low-income families; coming to school without even their basic needs met and under extreme stress. Moreover, the schools don’t have the funding necessary to address those needs.-First Books

Hope 1 Ministries delivers resources where they are needed most. Many of these children struggle with hunger, homelessness, violence, and lack of access to clean clothes, proper hygiene materials or relevant educational resources. Ensuring that children are in the right headspace to learn means tackling all the problems that are holding them back. As a result, these kids are behind in their education from the start and almost never catch up. The impact is devastating. The long-term economic devastation is deep and broad with the effect of an inequitable educational system being the equivalent of a national recession.

Kids need books of all kinds. You can help many kids get access to books of all kinds with a direct donation to Hope 1 Ministries this year. This year, Hope 4 Kids will feature and donate plethora of new to gently used books for transitional kindergarten through 12th-graders, as well as light refreshments, arts and crafts. Click here to donate to provide education essentials to children in need.

What we do. Collect Books-Our goal is to get as many books as possible into the hands of underserved children. We collect books through book drives and individual donations. We supplement these with targeted book purchases, for example teen books, bilingual and young adult books.

Distribute Book-We believe that ALL children should have books to call their own and we are passionate about making this happen. From the very beginning we have aimed to ‘think outside the box’ and find new and creative ways to get books into the hands of all children, anywhere and everywhere. Not just at schools, the logical place to do, but at community centers, at neighborhood events, through special youth partnerships, and more.

The Impact of Your Donation. Your generosity is helping us transform the lives of children in need by elevating the quality of their education. You help us reach hundreds of children and educators each year. To date, we have distributed more than 800 high-quality books and resources. Your donation today enables Hope 1 Ministries to continue our work to ensure that classrooms are stocked full of the resources that students and their teachers need to succeed this school year.

• Your gift of $25 or more today can help to immediately provide a child with a backpack filled with notebooks, crayons, books, snack pack and other school supplies.
• START YOUR DONATION

Why Do Kids Need Books?

• Books create warm emotional bonds between adults and kids when they read books together.
• Books help kids develop basic language skills and profoundly expand their vocabularies—much more than any other media.
• Books are interactive; they demand that kids think. Fiction and nonfiction books widen our consciousness. They give us new ways to think and new ideas. They expand our universe beyond time and place and inspire our own original thoughts.
• Books develop critical thinking skills. A book is read by an individual. It has no laugh track or musical score that emotionally primes a reader’s reaction. You alone decide what you think about a book and its contents with no one leaning over your shoulder telling you how to think.
• Books develop and nourish kids’ imaginations, expanding their worlds. Picture books introduce young children to the world of art and literature. Novels and nonfiction books stimulate kids’ sensory awareness, helping kids to see, hear, taste, feel, and smell on an imagined level. Books inform our imaginations, inspiring creativity.
• Books let kids try on the world before they have to go out into it. Books give kids an opportunity to experience something in their imaginations before it happens to them in real life. Books help prepare kids for their next stage of maturity, vicariously preparing for the “grown-up” world.
• BOOKS INSPIRE US TO DREAM.
• BOOKS GIVE US THE TOOLS TO ACHIEVE OUR DREAMS.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”  

Maya Angelou