Volunteer Center South Bay-Harbor-Long Beach

Food For Kids is the Volunteer Center’s volunteer and donation-driven food pantry that provides bags of non-perishable food and bilingual health-related inserts handouts to low-income students at partner elementary schools in the South Bay and Harbor areas each week.

Volunteers assemble and deliver bags of food - filled with items to make two breakfasts, lunches and dinners - to the local schools on Fridays. The school administration identifies the families with the greatest need each week, and the students take the bags home to share with their families over the weekend.

The Court Referral Community Service (CRCS) program provides assistance to thousands of clients who are given community service by the courts as an alternative sentence. CRCS staff works with eligible nonprofits in the community to help court volunteers complete their service. They also coordinate participation in the Hospital and Morgue (HAM) Program and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) Victim Impact Panels to help build awareness and empathy for people with specific offenses. This ensures that court volunteers can maintain their employment, education and other positive influences while completing their community service.

With the arrival of a new President/CEO in 2016, our Board of Directors began a strategic planning process to establish an updated vision for the organization's future. The process included an evaluation of existing programs and an assessment to identify the most critical community need: the mental health crisis facing our youth. Representatives from our community believe that this crisis is the result of excessive screen time and social media addiction, combined with a culture that glorifies perfection. Meanwhile, research shows that empathy and resilience are at an all-time low, in part due to the rise in screen time.

We used the community's input to research and develop a new, all-encompassing program to address these needs. Called "Engaging Hearts and Minds," the program combines three new strategies with updates to our existing programs - all designed to compassionately support community members, so everyone can look up, re-connect, empathize with each other, build resilience, express emotions and practice self-care.