Kris Kewitsch | Executive Director, Charities Review Council | September 2024
Meet Open Your Heart to the Hungry and Homeless!
Open Your Heart provides financial and technical support to homeless shelters, food shelves, and domestic violence shelters throughout the state, centered on the belief that every Minnesotan should be free from hunger and homelessness.
They provide grant funding, visibility and awareness building, and technical support for organizations doing the critical work of increasing food and housing security in our communities. Open Your Heart helps community partners with tangible resources that help them serve more people in need.
We recently asked Open Your Heart to the Hungry and Homeless,
Q: What would the community miss without your organization?
At Open Your Heart, our primary goal is to ensure that front line providers of crisis services have the tools, equipment, and infrastructure necessary to carry out their work. If we didn’t exist, emergency shelters, food shelves, and domestic violence shelters throughout Minnesota would be missing one of the few basic needs’ funders in the state. Without our funding they would be forced to allocate additional income to infrastructural needs rather than toward serving their community.
Open Your Heart earns the Meets Standards® seal through Charities Review Council’s Accountability Wizard® online tool.
Q: How has assessing your organization with the Accountability Wizard® strengthened your capabilities or led to improvements?
Assessing Open Your Heart has strengthened our capabilities by ensuring that we reflect and improve on the standards we set for ourselves, as well as the standard the community and those we serve have of us. Based on guidance from the Accountability Wizard®, Open You Heart will incorporate Charity Review Council’s DEI Toolkit as part of our 2023-2026 strategic planning initiatives.
Here you can find their latest annual report and financials.
Motivated to donate to Open Your Heart? If you are inspired by their work like we are, share this post with your networks to help spread the word. Thank you!
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