Meet the Team Behind: Family to Family

Family-to-Family connects families in need with those who can help—providing essential goods, resources, and direct support to uplift communities and create lasting connections. Learn more here! 

Can you tell me about the need for your work? 

Family-to-Family links families with “more” to families with profoundly less, helping to ease the burden of poverty and hunger in some of America's poorest communities. By connecting donors one-to-one with specific families in need, we bring a large and seemingly intractable problem into personal focus, making concrete and meaningful results possible. Providing food, personal hygiene products, and other basic life essentials to Americans struggling with poverty, we are challenging poverty one family at a time. 

How does your sponsorship program work? 

Donors sign up to sponsor a family, refugee, veteran, or community on our website. The monthly sponsorship fee provides families with groceries for the month. We encourage families to exchange emails or letters to get to know one another and build a long-term bond. Our refugee sponsorship program helps families and individuals as they arrive in the US, rebuild their lives, start jobs, and enroll in school. We also support struggling, working poor families who aren’t eligible for poverty relief programs because they live just above the poverty line. Beyond food, we also provide personal care items, birthday and holiday gifts, clothing, and more. 

Where do you work? 

We currently work in 33 communities across 14 states, sponsoring over 3,600 struggling parents, kids, and seniors with monthly groceries. We work with our nation’s most vulnerable populations in areas including Flint, Michigan; Yonkers, New York; Braddock, Pennsylvania; Mingo County, West Virginia, and many more. Since our founding, we’ve provided over 8 million meals to families in need. We work with organizations around the country who act as our “eyes on the ground,” identifying and recommending families to our programs, providing updates, and coordinating the distribution of the groceries and grocery vouchers we provide. They include schools, Boys & Girls clubs, food pantries, social service organizations, and more.

How do you support Holocaust survivors? 

An estimated one in three Holocaust survivors who now live in the US are living at or below the poverty line, struggling to pay for food, medicine, rent, utilities, and basic essentials. Our Holocaust Survivor Sponsorship Program is a way to help these elderly survivors who are living out the end of their lives in profound poverty. We partner with organizations in New York and California to identify survivors in need and pair them with our donors. As a donor, your monthly donation provides grocery gift cards to the elderly survivor you’re matched with. You also have the option to provide your survivor with extra funds to cover personal care items, holiday meals, or as gifts.