Americans Helping Americans

Our mission in Appalachia is to join communities, build and strengthen neighbor relations, and work side by side with residents to address community-wide concerns by linking resources and tools supportive of a healthy, safe, and economically vibrant standard of living. We hope to erase the poverty stricken image of Appalachia and replace it with an image of full lives of families and individuals that can meet basic needs, fulfill educational goals, and escape the cycle of poverty.
Our Safe Places program strives to continue providing victims of domestic violence and abuse with a safe haven and a brighter future.

Americans Helping Americans® seeks to bring about these changes by supplying basic but much-needed items such as shoes, coats, school supplies, and food, as well as allocating financial support for families to meet costs such as utilities, home repair, and emergency medical bills.
One of our primary concerns is, of course, the well-being of the children in these areas. We seek to not only support them through the above mentioned services and provisions, but also by providing them with additional support in the form of summer camps and after school programs. These projects keep them supervised and safe if their parents are working while simultaneously facilitating their educational and social growth to become successful members of the community when they grow up, thereby destroying the cycle of poverty.

We receive monetary support through donations from individuals and in-kind support from a variety of groups, including being a proud participant in the Combined Federal Campaign.
Americans Helping Americans® is also able to ensure that our donations and funds are spent responsibly through our partnership approach which affords us an intimate and regular correspondence with our program partners, and also allows us to regularly monitor each project and its adherence to our standards of budgeting and planning. By working with partners, we become closely engaged with the community and the beneficiaries of each project, which prepares us for subsequent projects in the region or with the same program partner. In this way, we can deliver facilitate change in partnership with our neighbors, and we can be accountable to our supporters around the country.

So far, Americans Helping Americans® has established solid partnerships with existing efforts in communities across Appalachia that allow us to work with their residents in an effective and resource efficient manner. We have reached a point of confidence in our partnerships where we know that our donors are supporting the people who need it most and in the most effective way possible. Our partnerships allow us to not only respond immediately in times of emergency, but they allow us to collaborate and develop long-term solutions for recurring problems in the community.

However, there are always people we aren't reaching. We hope to expand our services and the reach of our partnerships in the years to come, or provide other resources and tools to the communities we cannot serve.

Another accomplishment-in-progress will be our adaptation to the newest shift in federal focus from transitional housing to permanent housing placement. We have been successful in adjusting our affordable housing programs to offer more training and placement services that shift our residents into permanent housing at a faster pace, and we hope to continue these successes with all of our units.