How your giving is handled — and where it goes

Hearts 4Kids Inc is a registered 501(c‌)(3) public charity, EIN 47-4834211, with a mailing address of 25975 Meredith St., La Feria, Texas 78559. Gifts from U.S. donors are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law, and you receive a receipt for every donation.

You do not have to take our word for any of that. Our status can be confirmed in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search by EIN, and our organizational record — legal name, EIN, address, ruling year — is public on Candid (GuideStar). We link both from our impact figures for exactly this reason: a donor should be able to verify a nonprofit without asking the nonprofit.

How a donation is processed

Online gifts are processed through Zeffy, a fundraising platform built for nonprofits. The secure Zeffy form is embedded on our Donate page, payment details never touch our own systems, and donors receive an emailed receipt after a gift is completed. You can request a duplicate receipt at any time by emailing us.

For a stock gift, a donor-advised fund grant, a workplace matching program or a bequest, email us and we will send the details your administrator needs. Please never send card or bank details by email.

Recurring gifts are the single most useful form of support, and not for sentimental reasons. Predictable monthly income lets us buy school supplies in June rather than late August, commit to a materials budget for a team booked nine months out, and keep a distribution running through the slow giving months of spring.

Where the money actually goes

Most of it is spent locally and on materials. Groceries and pallet costs for church-hosted distributions. Roofing, sheetrock, siding, paint, flooring and lumber for home repair projects. Supplies and consumables for community health screens. Backpacks, notebooks and shoes for children in August. Fuel and vehicle costs to move all of it around four counties.

Buying in the Valley is deliberate. Ordering materials from a Valley supplier costs about what ordering them anywhere else costs, and it keeps the spending in the same economy we are trying to strengthen. The same logic applies to labor we cannot get from volunteers.

Designating a gift

You can direct a donation to a specific program — food distribution, home repair, health screens or children's programs — by noting it in the giving form or emailing us. We honor designations. Undesignated gifts are more useful to us, because they let us fund whichever of those is short this month, but a designated gift is always better than a gift not given.

What we will not do

We do not sell, rent or trade donor information, ever. We do not publish photographs of children in ways that identify them or their address. We do not invent impact numbers: every figure on this site is either something we can document or something reported by a named outlet with the year attached, and where a number is a point-in-time project total rather than an annual figure, we label it as such.

Questions are welcome

If you want to know something specific — how a particular gift was used, what a project cost, why a number on our site is what it is — ask. We would rather answer a direct question than have a supporter quietly wonder.