Residents of the  Santa Clarita Valley have heard of Help the Children. Most people hear about us through word of mouth and are not sure what to do. Help the Children offers food, clothing, personal hygiene items, and limited job information for Santa Clarita families in need. And when donations permit, we share resources with a number of other Santa Clarita Valley nonprofit organizations.

However, the areas of need we address go beyond Santa Clarita Valley. Our headquarters, located near downtown Los Angeles, in partnership with more than 600 nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles County, distributes approximately 3 million pounds of food each month, feeding more than 130,000 families.

Help the Children also distributes disaster relief locally, nationally and worldwide. Help the Children supports orphanages  in Honduras and Kenya. We’ve built a 33,000-square-foot hospital in Northern Guatemala. Help the Children also  sends teams of medical and dental residents, mainly from UCLA and USC, abroad to provide free medical and dental care to those in need.

Help the Children strongly supports the military. We have veteran programs in place such as the Military Family Assistance program and the Vet-Working Community Partners committee. Since we began, we have distributed more than $700 million worth of aid throughout the world.

Compared to 1.2 million other charities in America, here is how Help the Children is rated:

-By the Chronicles of Philanthropy, Help the Children is in the top 400 largest charities.

-By Forbes.Com, Help the Children remains in the 200 largest charities.

-By Yahoo.Com/Financial, Help the Children is ranked  as the 7th most efficient charity.

-By Mainstreet.Com, Help the Children is noted as the  7th most efficient charity in the United States.

Our network of programs operates on a 1 percent – yes, one percent – overhead. Additionally, our operations are funded only by donations and grants, not by government funding. This saves the governments money, wherever the aid is distributed. This also frees us to help families in need that don’t qualify for government-sponsored programs.

In some cases, this helps a family not to lose their home before they get any help. If their situation is caused by an illness and they can’t afford medical care, doesn’t it make sense to let them recuperate at their home? One might conclude, Help the Children provides the most help for the community at the least cost to the community.

Since 2002, Help the Children has provided more than 23,000 shopping visits for families in the Santa Clarita Valley, at no expense to the city.

Help the Children is exploring the feasibility of relocating our headquarters to the Santa Clarita Valley. If this move occurs, a tremendous resource to help local, national and international needs would be provided by the largest independent charity in California.  Our community proves time and again that people do care and we reach out to help others.

Please join our mission to assist our local, national and international communities experience a better quality of life.

Michael Santomauro is the director of Help the Children in Santa Clarita.