Heart House

Heart House is a nonprofit that provides safety, education and opportunity to refugee and underprivileged children. Operating Monday through Friday from 3:30-6:00 pm on all Dallas Independent School District (DISD) school days, students receive receive a nutritious meal, homework assistance, a structured curriculum, supervised outdoor playtime, and computer literacy activities as part of a holistic approach to accomplishing our mission. This serves to build up our students' health and safety awareness, social and emotional development, character development, cultural awareness, and academic support.

To this end, Heart House's program engages our students with learning experiences for their “head, heart and hands" through targeted methods such as specialized ESL curriculum, individualized attention, and learning centers focused on reading. We provide academic support to come alongside of students' cognitive learning (head,) curriculum to impact the formation of their character (heart), and encourage them to go out into the world to impact their community in tangible ways (hands).

Heart House currently serves 120 children, representing 15 languages and dialects. The majority of those children are Asian (53%) or Latino (27%).

Students in our program have experienced an average increase of 25% in reading fluency over the course of a year. The average third graders words per minute rose from 81 words per minute pretest to 107 words per minute posttest, and average increase of 26 words per minute. The average fourth graders words per minute rose from 89.6 words per minute pretest to 108.2 words per minute posttest, and average increase of 18.6 words per minute. The average fifth graders results went from 108.8 words per minute up to 112 words per minute, an average increase of 4 words per minute.

Many of the 53,000 residents within our neighborhood are immigrants and refugees. Of that population 5,303 are under the age of six, and 3,932 are between the ages of six and thirteen. 39% are considered “asset poor". Heart House serves children from various backgrounds and ethnicities that truly reflect the community in which we operate. We serve only 120 of those children out of four sites; that leaves a vast number of children without the needed services and interventions we provide. Heart House needs to expand its program to more sites within the neighborhood, and to duplicate its model in other refugee communities in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.