Help Texas Recover after Hurricane Harvey

Our Hurricane Harvey relief programs in Houston and Coastal Bend had a successful holiday season filled with love, laughter and continued hard work in the community. We are excited to highlight our work with Rockport Hands of Hope, Habitat for Humanity and the Navajo Nation, in partnership with whom we completed 24 homes. By emboldening the skills of each organization, we could each specialize in a particular phase of work to accelerate the completion of those homes so families could move back in faster. The holiday spirit didn’t stop there: when they weren’t hard at work in homes, our volunteers and staff hit the pavement to distribute turkeys to Houston families, and serve hundreds of meals at the 76th Annual Jim Salem Dinner in Coastal Bend. We know that every step we take together to care for our communities adds up.

As we begin a new year, our programs are looking to make 2020 another year of putting families back into their homes. We are excited about our new partnership with Interfaith Action of Central Texas (iACT). By working together, we aim to help an additional 10 families move back home. To date, our teams have completed work on 91 homes between both programs, and are in various stages of rebuild on 8 homes, continuing to implement resilient design techniques. The use of water-resistant products, for example, allows homeowners to be better prepared for future disasters.

In addition to our traditional recovery work, we continue to partner with other local organizations in an effort to expand our impact on affected communities. In Houston, we’ve continued to support Food Not Bombs by distributing food to communities in need, while in Coastal Bend we’ve continued to work on community beautification projects with Keep Aransas County Beautiful. Volunteers worked on their off-days in an effort to preserve what is incredibly important to the community. Their hard work lends itself to our mission of community renewal above and beyond our traditional recovery work.

Thanks to the generosity of GlobalGiving and donors such as yourself, All Hands and Hearts has been able to help families get back into their homes for the holidays, and plan to continue rebuilding in Texas well into the new year. Josefina, the owner of a recently completed home, expressed her thanks: “You don’t ask for anything in return for the work — you are special people. I am excited and forever grateful to you for all you have done”.