The Pulse

A day out of the office helps Haiti relief

For 26 volunteers from State Street Corp. in Kansas City, Friday was not a typical day in the office.

The volunteers spent the day volunteering with Heart to Heart, doing quality control on Heart to Heart Care Kits at the Global Distribution Center in Kansas City, Kan.

The volunteers shifted through hundreds of plastic zippered bags to verify that the 10 required personal hygiene items - ranging from combs to hand towels - were included in each one. They then packed the plastic bags in banana cartons for shipment to Haiti.

Heart to Heart already has shipped thousands of the Care Kits to Haitians left homeless by the Jan. 12 earthquake, which is now being called the worst natural disaster in history. Heart to Heart is hoping to raise enough donated cash, hygiene products and volunteer time to ship 100,000 Care Kits to Haiti.

The State Street volunteer program

Green Lantern: 'A great wash for a great cause'

The car was winter dirty, the kind of dirty that only Kansas salt-streaked roads bring on. Twenty minutes later, it was just about showroom new. And, in the process, $20 was contributed for Heart to Heart International and Haitian relief.

Green Lantern Express Service Car Washes are raising $20,000 for Heart to Heart and the Haitian relief effort. Through Jan. 31, the Salina-based car wash chain is matching up to $10,000 in donations from its customers.

Green Lantern has locations in Olathe, Liberty, Wichita, and St. Peters, Mo.

We took a spin through Green Lantern in Olathe, turning Heart to Heart staffer Pete Brumbaugh's winterized wheels into something that looked - and smelled - brand new.

Creating Healthier Communities

Sometimes the only thing standing between a trained healthcare worker and a healthy patient is an appropriate medical treatment. For millions of people around the world every year, Heart to Heart stands in that gap by providing shipments of quality medical aid.

When it comes to helping people with health needs, we are intensely local. We find pockets of need -- whether here in the United States or in 60 other countries around the world every year -- and seek to improve health at the community level.

In fact, we have initiated a pilot project in our hometown of Kansas City. Working with a select set of free health clinics, we're taking our model of global-assistance partnerships and localizing it at these clinics. Propelled by two separate grants -- one from the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City and the another from the REACH Foundation -- we have become a vital link in their supply chain. We provide each clinic with regular shipments of medicines and supplies. We also deploy volunteers with technical expertise in public health, family medicine and laboratory services to increase clinical capacity.

Dr. Florence Ndikum-Moffor (pictured) leads our clinic-outreach initiatives. She says she's excited about working alongside our clinic partners and helping them meet the increasing demand for their services, as more unemployed workers and families seek health services at these safety-net clinics.

We are also deploying our mobile clinics to assist in community health fairs. When medically indigent people don't have access to basic health services or cannot afford these services, we work with our clinic partners to bring these services to the community.

You can support our local health efforts by volunteering with Heart to Heart, sharing our story with those in your network that can help us, or making an online donation today.

Thnaks in advance for helping us create a healthier world -- one community at a time.

The Need for Speed

Heart to Heart adopted the "Tools for School" initiative in 2006. In the first two years under our wings, roughly 8,000 disadvantaged children per year received a new backpack filled with essential, age-appropriate school supplies.

Then, in 2008, we were able to reach out to 12,000 kids in the Kansas City area and beyond.

During each of those three years, volunteers gathered in one of the underground warehouses operated by Meritex Logistics off 95th Street & Renner in Lenexa, KS. Over the span of two weeks, hundreds of volunteers would filter in and out of the warehouse location to help us fill the backpacks. If you were there to see it, you'd say it was pretty amazing -- even inspirational -- to see people of all ages coming to give kids a boost before the start of the upcoming school year.

This year, we moved the initiative to our Global Distribution Center in Kansas City. We also simplified the process. A lot. Instead of learning a whole system for filling the backpacks, we introduced pre-packaged school supplies, which were quickly inserted into new backpacks and packed in boxes.

The result: Nearly 10,000 backpacks were filled in less than five days! (For the non-math students in the audience, that's basically half the time it used to take to fill the backpacks.)

Thanks to all those who volunteered for this effort (even those who signed up for the second week)! You changed the course a student's life!

Stay tuned for video footage from the effort.

Tools for School

As part of the 2009 Summer of Service, we are encouraging people to get involved with our "Tools for School" initiative.

Over the span of two weeks, hundreds of volunteers will flood our Global Distribution Center in Kansas City, KS and help us assemble 8,000 backpacks full of essential school supplies. These backpacks will be distributed to disadvantaged children in Kansas City and beyond.

We "adopted" this initiative in 2006 and it's been a wonderful entry point for volunteers ever since.

Over the years, this initiative has provided more than 130,000 kids with a new backpack, so they can start the school year on the right foot.

You can join this effort! We need at least 100 more volunteers to help us. Weekday sessions from 9 a.m.-12 noon and 1-4 p.m. are available during July 13-17 and July 20-24. Some weeknight slots are available from 5-8 p.m.

These three-hour sessions make great team-building exercises or community-service projects for your family, school group, civic club, faith community or local business.

Contact Heart to Heart today by calling 913-764-5200 or signing up online and bring a smile to a student in need.

First Friday: Summer of Service

"First Friday" is a special message each month from Heart to Heart's CEO, Jon D. North, and communicates our agenda for the coming weeks. The column usually appears on the first Friday of each month (though this month it appears on the second Friday). In this edition of "First Friday" Jon talks about the impact of volunteers on our global work...

When Heart to Heart was founded back in 1992, it had a distinctive "grassroots" feel and was fueled almost entirely by volunteers from all walks of life. Though we have gotten more professional on the staff side over the years, we have not lost our perspective on the value of volunteerism.

Today, volunteers still help us at almost every turn -- whether it's answering the phones or stuffing envelopes at our world headquarters, sorting product or packing pallets at our warehouse, helping us create healthier communities at home or abroad, or making our events flow seamlessly.

Volunteers keep us ticking and they help us stretch every dollar even further.

Over the next three months, I encourage you to volunteer as part of our "Summer of Service." We have something for everyone -- from individuals and families to schools, civic groups and businesses.

NOAA: Busy Hurricane Season Ahead

Hurricane season is just around the corner. That means it's time to look into the crystal ball and check out what weather forecasters are saying about the odds of a major hurricane.

First up to the plate was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which said today that it's going to be a busy storm season in the Atlantic this year: A strong possibility of 9-14 named storms, 4-7 of which could become hurricanes, including 1-3 becoming major hurricanes.

A tropical storm is named once it has sustained winds of 39 mph and it becomes a hurricane when it has sustained winds of 74 mph.

Major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 and 5 storms) have sustained winds of 111 mph of more. These types of storms are also known as typhoons or cyclones in other parts of the world.

While it looks to be a busy hurricane season, Heart to Heart is making preparations to be ready if one of these storms makes landfall.

Last year, Heart to Heart was on the scene and on the job when Hurricane Ike struck Galveston, Texas. We worked with the University of Texas Medical Branch to provide ongoing medical care to people affected by the storm, since none of the hospitals or clinics were too badly damaged to see any patients.

Sign up today to join our readiness team. There's a place for you on our Crisis Response Team. We need individuals, groups and companies to be readt when duty calls.

You can also help us by packing Care Kits, which we distribute to people in crisis in the U.S. and in disaster zones all around the world. Here are the instructions on how to build these hygiene kits.

Remembering China: One Year Later

One year after a massive earthquake struck Sichuan Province in southwestern China, residents are still recovering. It was on May 12 near the city of Beichuan that a magnitude-7.8 quake leveled towns and buried residents. In the end, it left more than 90,000 dead or missing and nearly 5 million homeless.

Heart to Heart was one of the first groups on the scene. Our medical staff in Chengdu quickly mobilized for action and joined the Chinese Red Cross in providing emergency care for survivors.

We were able send a GO Team of 30 U.S.-based volunteers and several additional staff members to help coordinate the unprecedented relief effort.

Within 30 days of the disaster, Heart to Heart had mobilized nearly 4,000 China-based volunteers to assist in delivering relief supplies to villagers trapped in mountains and hillsides of Sichuan.

Thanks to grants from companies like FedEx and New York Life, we have continued to focus our efforts on disaster-readiness training over the past year.

We are remembering China today, as the nation marks the one-year anniversary of the Beichuan earthquake.

On May 22, another Heart to Heart team will travel to Chengdu and help lead training exercises on pandemic preparedness and emergency-response coordination.

You can support the team's efforts by making an online donation today.

Arriving at the Right Time

Our volunteer team arrived in Guatemala City this afternoon, as health officials there confirmed the first case of the unique Influenza A/H1N1 virus.

The team is in the country this week to promote hand washing and prevention of the H1N1 virus. They are also installing water-filtration systems in several homes, so families have access to clean drinking water.

You can support their efforts by making an online donation today.

Every contribution helps.

Heart to Heart Commercial: Got Game?

In the midst of a mounting crisis around the world, Heart to Heart is offering an escape from the worries of life through the game of golf. Every year, we put on the Ewing M. Kauffman Golf Classic at Kansas City's historic Oakwood Country Club. This year's event takes place on Monday, May 18.

We are looking to round out our competitive field of golfers. To promote our event and attract a few more foursomes, we turned to two local firms for help.

First, Gaut Media (pronounced "got") produced a snazzy one-minute video for us free-of-charge. Then, Professional Emercials, run by Heart to Heart alum Lori Ketterling, offered its services pro-bono, so we could target locally based companies and professional services with the video.

Here is the Heart to Heart emercial.

And check out the video below.

While you're enjoying the fruits of these donations, consider signing up your foursome or sending the emercial link to someone who might be interested in the event.