While Kars4Kids primarily focuses on providing educational, mentorship and youth development opportunities to Jewish children and their families, the Kars4Kids small grant program allows us to help other underserved populations as well, through the deserving charities that work with them.

The list of organizations we’ve helped that work with low-income, at-risk, or minority children is long. Here are some of the organizations assisting these children that have received small grants from Kars4Kids:

• Seattle ICO
• Free Arts for Children’s Court
• TeenSHARP
• Opportunity Neighborhood
• The Reading Connection
• Harris Foundation
• Wings
• Hibiscus
• Gary Comer Youth Center
• TADA
• Companies to Classrooms
• BCAUSEICAN
• Kids Cooking for Life
• Our Piece of the Pie
• The Learning Lab Hawthorne Sycamore
• ReadBoston
• SCOPE

Seattle ICO helps city children experience the great outdoors, while Free Arts for Children’s Court helps distract troubled children with cathartic art projects as their parents are hashing out custody issues in court. TeenSHARP helps teens think about going to college so they can break the vicious cycle of poverty they were born into.

Opportunity Neighborhood encourages pride of place and a sense of neighborhood in low-income housing, while The Reading Connection offers children pre-literacy skills by ensuring kids have access to books and stories. The Harris Foundation pushes STEM subjects in a way that’s all-encompassing, that really illustrates how these skills are life skills. WINGS gives kids control over their emotions, when everything else in their lives may be in chaos.

Hibiscus takes in the kids no one else wants, the toughest cases of all: abused and abandoned foster children, while Gary Comer Youth Center brightens up Chicago’s Southside with possibility in a neighborhood deemed hopelessly crime-ridden. TADA reaches children through the magic of musical theater while Companies to Classrooms takes office supplies that would have gone to waste and uses them to help children have what they need in school.

BCAUSEICAN is about men mentoring kids to lead healthy lives, learn how to use computers, and become financially literate. Kids Cooking for Life is about fighting obesity by teaching kids to eat healthy.
Our Piece of the Pie is helping kids in Hartford to finish high school, to make something of themselves, while The Learning Lab at Hawthorne Sycamore makes up for the inadequacies of the public school system in the poorest neighborhoods, helping to prepare kids for a better future.

ReadBoston ensures that preschool children in Boston are exposed to the printed word: a way to get ready for school they would not otherwise have. SCOPE not only gives inner-city children a chance to go to summer camp, but uses this as a motivation to get them through school.

All of these great organizations applied to Kars4Kids for small grants and we were thrilled to give them a hand, to help the children we can’t reach on our own: underserved children who need just a bit of help to get where they’re going, who need that steep playing field leveled, at least just a bit.

It gives us immense pleasure to be able to help children, wherever they are, with whatever they need to be the best they can be.

That’s what Kars4Kids is all about, as you can see.