Social Service/Public Welfare/Human Services

The parents of the two-year-old Nebraska boy who was killed by an alligator last year at Disney World have established a foundation in their son’s name to help families of children in need of organ transplants. It’s been more than a year since Lane Graves was snatched by an alligator and dragged to his death in…

A new effort with the backing of some major names in the advertising industry is launching with an ambitious goal: create 130,000 jobs for people with developmental disabilities by 2020. Leaders of several New York advertising agencies are coming together to form the nonprofit Creative Spirit, which will work to grow employment opportunities for those…

Former NFL Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick was a lone nut. He was the guy who famously took a knee during the playing of the National Anthem before games to protest discrimination and brutality against minorities by police. The events of the past week transformed him from a lone nut into the leader of a movement...

The proposed 11th Street Bridge Park that would cross the Anacostia River continues to inspire big-name philanthropists to write big checks to revitalize some of the District’s poorest neighborhoods and help low-income residents prepare should an economic turnaround arrive. The latest is JPMorgan Chase. Over the next 3 years, the financial giant agreed to donate $10 million…

Tears flowed at Our Lady of Carmen and Saint Joseph Parrish on Thursday night as the families of two dead children killed when a powerful earthquake toppled their school a few blocks away interred their ashes The crushed victims, 7-year-old Eduardo Diaz and 8-year-old Francisco Quintero, were two of the 286 people reported killed by…

Former Yankees great Jorge Posada and his wife, Laura, are spearheading a fundraising campaign to aid hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. The fundraising page on YouCaring has raised over $68,000 of its $100,000 goal from 408 donors in less than 24 hours. Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina and his wife, Wanda, have launched a similar campaign,…

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit Central Mexico on Tuesday, crumbling infrastructure and killing more than 230 people so far, including at least 25 school children. Families are still searching for their loved ones as rescue teams dig through rubble to uncover survivors. And hospital staff are doing their best to treat the hundreds of people…

Nathalie Graham will turn off the lights in the Community Center of Abingdon before ending its Meals on Wheels program. “I would rather turn off the electricity here than stop giving out meals,” said Graham, the center’s executive director. “This [Meals on Wheels] is not something that would be nice to do, it’s something that…

Churches, synagogues and mosques became literal shelters in the storm, as Harvey and Irma ravaged East Texas, Florida and the Caribbean. Faithful volunteers clocked tens of thousands of hours to help victims. Some churches even served as staging areas and distribution centers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But what happens when the places of…

Because I work for a disaster relief agency that also provides a variety of other important daily services, I am always interested in studying why certain donors only give for disaster relief. On a small sample, I noticed that more than 4,000 of our donors gave for the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005, but did not give in subsequent years...