ReliefSaint Cloud March 12, 2026 · Hannah J. Sanders, M.S.
Community Resilience: Uplifting Low-Income Families Through Targeted Relief
The afternoon the window unit died, the thermometer on the porch at a rental east of Canoe Creek Road read 92 degrees. A grandmother sat on the shaded step with two school-age children and a bag of melting ice. She had already called the landlord. She had already called a cousin in Kissimmee who could not leave a warehouse shift. What she had not called was us —until a neighbor who packs meals on Tuesdays wrote our address on a grocery receipt and said, "They answer."
Hannah J. Sanders met them at 1170 Playa Del Sol Ln before the dinner line opened. There was no intake theater. We asked three questions: How many people sleep in the house tonight? When was the last full meal? What happens if the power stays off through the weekend? The answers were practical and tired. Eric Ochala H Bagho authorized a window unit from the crisis closet and a grocery card sized for four days, not four months. A volunteer drove the unit over in a personal truck. Direct emergency counseling —the quiet kind, about which bill to pay first —happened at the kitchen table while the house cooled down. That is targeted relief. It is not a campaign. It is a hardware-store run with a receipt that Denise N. Rossi will file by Friday.
Since the 2023 exemption date we have sat in more rooms like that one than we can photograph. Some visits are a utility matching payment arranged with a partner congregation. Some are a translator on speakerphone so a Vietnamese-speaking parent can understand a shut-off notice written only in English. Some are simply Tuesday"s hot meal packages, prepared in Saint Cloud and handed out while the rice is still warm. The count in the field book is now more than 2,500 households. We do not claim we ended poverty on a block. We claim we kept the lights on long enough for a parent to make the next phone call.
What "targeted" means, on our ledger, is that we do not spray the same gift on every door. A family with a working car and a missed electric bill gets a different envelope than a family with no ice and a medically fragile elder. First responders still send us after house fires and after the last bad storm cell. We keep a small stock of blankets, hygiene kits, and phone chargers because those items disappear in the first hour. If you want to help this work, the crisis fund is the line item that moves fastest. A $50 gift restocks a grocery card. A $250 gift often covers a utility deposit. We will tell you, if you ask, which of those we spent last week.
YouthMentorship January 28, 2026 · Hannah J. Sanders, M.S.
Education First: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty Through Mentorship
Saturday mornings behind Narcoossee Road do not look like a commencement stage. They look like folding tables, a crate of donated graphing calculators, and a cooler of orange slices. A seventh-grader named "L." — we use the initial because his mother asked — arrived last fall with a crumpled progress report and a habit of staring at the pavement. His mentor, a retired bus driver who lives three streets from our office, did not give a speech about potential. He asked L. to open the math book to the page with the red marks and they sat there until the fractions made a kind of sense.
That is the whole method. Weekend outdoor mentoring sessions run from 9:00 to 11:30 a.m. when the weather holds. When it rains, we move under the pavilion and keep the same two hours. We do not promise college in a brochure. We promise an adult who already knows the child"s name and will be there next Saturday. Parents who work a double at the hotels along 192 can leave a sibling with the youth table while they sit in the skills lab next door. That pairing was Hannah"s idea after watching a mother choose between her own resume and her son"s algebra. We stopped making her choose.
The adult side of "education first" is the Wednesday night digital workshop. People who lost a warehouse shift often have not used email in years. We print resumes on paper because a hiring manager in a small shop still asks for paper. More than 600 learners have finished a full course since we opened the lab. Some come back as volunteer coaches. James, who started after a layoff, now covers a Saturday when the retired bus driver has a medical appointment. The cycle we are trying to interrupt is the quiet one: a child who never sees an adult recover from a job loss, and therefore assumes recovery is a story for other families.
Mentorship is slow, which makes it a poor subject for a billboard and a good subject for a donor who can wait. A $25 gift buys workbooks and pencils for a month of Saturdays. A monthly gift keeps the laptop loaner shelf from emptying. If you can give time instead of money, we need mentors who will commit to eight Saturdays, not one photogenic morning. Write to us through the contact page. Bring patience. Leave the slogans in the car.
AccountabilityForm 990 April 2, 2026 · Denise N. Rossi, CPA, CGMA
Annual Impact Report: 100% Transparency and Dedicated Donor Service
Calendar year 2025 closed on December 31, which is the accounting period printed on our IRS letter. I am the Treasurer. My job in April is not to write a victory lap. It is to put numbers next to the meals, the counseling hours, and the workshop seats so a donor in another zip code can decide whether we are telling the truth. Form 990 is required of this organization. The draft sits with the board before it sits with the Service. Anyone may search EIN 92-1126664 on the IRS Exempt Organizations Select Check. Anyone may email admin@henrybagho.org and ask for a copy of the most recent return. We will not make you join a newsletter to see it.
Here is the split we actually used: 88 percent of donated funds went to direct programs —crisis relief, the Tuesday kitchen, Saturday mentoring, and the skills lab. Eight percent covered administration: insurance, the post-office box, software that David F. Adebayo, LL.M., uses to keep minutes and the website from living on a personal laptop forever. Four percent covered fundraising: printed receipts, a modest thank-you mailing, and the payment-processing fees we cannot avoid. If a year comes when those percentages slip, we will say so on this page before a watchdog says it for us.
Dedicated donor service, in our office, looks like a human being answering a receipt question. If your employer matches gifts, send the form to the same email. If you need the legal name exactly as the IRS has it, we will print Letter 947 —dated May 11, 2023, effective January 1, 2023, public charity status 509(a)(2), DLN 26053521011253. The principal officer is Eric Ochala H Bagho. The street is 1170 Playa Del Sol Ln, Saint Cloud, FL 34771-7564. We do not sell or rent the donor list. We never have. That promise is also in the privacy policy, because Google Ad Grants reviewers and ordinary people both have a right to read it.
Impact, counted without poetry: more than 2,500 households received crisis or counseling help; more than 600 adults finished a skills course; more than 4,000 nutritious meals left the Tuesday line. Candid"s Platinum Seal of Transparency for 2026 is on our public profile because we uploaded the same documents we already keep in the corporate book. If you gave last year, thank you. If you are deciding this year, read the letter, read the 990 search, and then decide. We would rather lose a gift to a careful reader than win one with fog.
