Assertive Kids Foundation

The Assertive Kids Foundation seeks to address the issue of human suffering due to various causes.

We help families in need by providing kids' clothing to them. Every child should have clothes that fit, enough outfits so that they can walk without the shame and stigma of poverty.

We also aim to provide homeless people with care packages consisting of toiletries, socks, emergency blankets, hand warmers, and non-perishable energy bars. While this does not help long-term, it does help individuals to cope with hardships germane to their unique challenges for another day. Our goal is to ease their burden, if even just for a little while, in limited ways. We also  have a plan for an experimental living facility, which would be a long long-term means of addressing homelessness as a phenomenon.

Volunteers have also performed several neighborhood trash cleanups, both on heavily littered urban sidewalks and in NYC parks, where we've removed bags and bags of litter. We also plan to have our volunteers plant urban areas with flower seeds and bulbs, to help brighten blighted areas.
 
Assertive Kids Foundation also provides assistance to local wildlife whose habitats have been steadily decreasing in land area due to over-development.

Research studies for pregnant women, children with autism and ADHD, people suffering from opioid addiction, as well as veterans with PTSD are planned for the near future. We also intend to help people in these groups afford complementary medical care.

Once in-person schooling has resumed, Assertive Kids will be providing workshops for students in local schools. These workshops will focus on teaching kids about assertiveness, aggression, passivity, narcissism, and other topics that will better prepare them to handle bullying and toxic people. Helping to prepare kids to deal with others is essential. In contemporary society, we are educated in the sciences, we are educated in literature. However, we remain ignorant of how to navigate interpersonal relationships.

Some of the workshops will also focus on ageism, a very relevant topic for the day as our nation grows older.

Assertive Kids Foundation solicits clothing donations from the public for the kids clothing drive, and relies on volunteers to sort, catalog, and deliver the clothes to children in local NYC and NJ Metro Area communities.

We will be relying on donations from the local community in order to purchase the items for homeless people's care package items, and volunteers will assemble the packages. Additional volunteers will bring the care packages to local homeless individuals. As far as our "Last Resort Towers" plan, we would need a partner to help build a site to test the viability of this idea.

Volunteers will perform neighborhood cleanups, with beautification teams planting flowers and picking up garbage from parks and sidewalks in depressed areas. Volunteers will be provided with gloves and trash bags.

Local wildlife assistance helps primarily birds of all types and squirrels. High-quality edible seeds and nuts are placed in areas where animals can easily access them.

Research studies will be developed with local universities, and volunteer participants will be solicited. This will require monetary donations, as health  professionals participating in studies must be compensated. In lieu of monetary payment, participants will receive treatment free of cost.

The Foundation is also creating learning materials for our Assertiveness Workshops, utilizing the latest in research on sociology, psychology, and education. This strategy will aim at informing, and educating, workshop participants.

Our organization has been receiving references for children in need of clothing from other local charities in our area, including several religious charities. We will also be partnering with local businesses and individuals who will provide clothing to us for these disadvantaged children. We are also applying for many relevant grants that will help us to purchase the clothing for distribution.

Our organization has several capable volunteers who will be assembling the care packages for homeless people, and we will be working together with other charities, as well as other individuals in our local community who are familiar with their local homeless populations, in order to facilitate distribution of the care packages.

The staff members for Assertive Kids Foundation are themselves holistic healthcare practitioners, familiar with the benefits of many complementary medicine modalities. It is this experience that will be called upon to create and design the studies.

The workshops are being created by the president of the Foundation. The President has a background in learning, having tutored English-As-A-Second-Language (ESL) as well as students with Learning Differences at C.U.N.Y CSI's Learning Center for five years. The president also taught remedial level reading, writing, and speaking at CUNY, completed a concentration in Elementary Education, and worked as a Music Specialist in the NYC Board of Education.

Presentations at local schools will be made by multiple professionals, including other educators and experts on bullying, as well as people who have experienced bullying firsthand.

In Fiscal Year 2020 (which ends in June of 2021), we have distributed close to $50,000 in clothing so far, as many members of the community provided us with in-kind donations for distribution. In Fiscal Year 2019, we distributed approximately $22,000 in clothing to local families.

    All of this was done by volunteers alone, sorting, cataloging, pricing, and distributing the clothing to local families, and all of this was accomplished with no direct monetary donations, from either individuals or businesses, and no non-profit organization grants.

    Recipients have included: children of refugees, disabled parents, low income parents, parents affected by the pandemic with job loss or income reduction, as well as members of local Native American tribes. Altogether, 30 children were helped in 2019.

    Out of these, 5 were in Mariner's Harbor, 12 were in New Brighton, 4 were in Arlington, 3 were in Elm Park, one was in the Dongan Hills Projects, one was in New Jersey, 2 were in Brooklyn Projects, 1 was in a Queens Project, and 1 was in Manhattan.

    Several of the children helped were finally receiving a permanent home after leaving a shelter, and one of them was previously in foster care and being returned to her birth mom.

    The ethnicity of the children were as follows: 14 were Black/African American, 4 were White/Caucasian, 11 were Hispanic.

    In addition to these individual families, Assertive Kids also donated chocolate bars and candy, as well as a Tofurky Vegetarian Feast, to several local food banks and food pantries on Staten Island, including Project Hospitality, Salvation Army, and the Seventh Day Adventist Church. These all serve disadvantaged local communities with fresh food on a weekly or more frequent basis. The Salvation Army received the Tofurky very happily, as they have a vegetarian family that comes for their annual Thanksgiving Dinner, and in 2019 they had a real Thanksgiving feast with a "turkey" and all the trimmings.

    In Fiscal Year 2020, an additional 70 children were helped, plus 5,000 members of a Native American tribe in New Jersey, an estimated 1,000 members of a local church that operates a “dress for success” program, and an estimated 500 members of a small church in Mariners Harbor.

    Of the individual children noted above, 39 or 55% were Black, 13 or 19% were Hispanic, 17 or 24% were White, 1 or 1.4% were Asian. The members of both churches are mostly Black and Hispanic, and the Lenape tribe members are Native American.

    We have begun researching the purchasing of supplies for the homeless population, and will continue to purchase further supplies with the donations that are received. Each Homeless Care package has an approximate cost of $20, and ideally we would like to distribute care packages for at least 10 or more homeless people in the local community.

    We have begun formulating the studies for pregnant populations. Participants have not yet been solicited as further contributions