(Seguin) — The end of the year brings with it a number of opportunities for you to make some charitable donations for 2023. Several local and national non-profit groups have been reaching out to the public to encourage folks consider making some additional donations to close out this year. That long list of local charities include organizations like the Christian Cupboard and the Guadalupe Valley Chapter of Habitat for Humanity. That’s a small sample of the organizations seeking these end-of-year donations.
TruLight127 Ministries is also among the non-profit groups looking for more donations to wrap up 2023. TruLight provides shelter services at its TruLight Village in Seguin. It also offers foster/adoption services for kids here in this area. Executive Director Sondra Ajasin says they continue to support children in need, and they are also expanding the number of services that they offer.
“By just the generosity of the community, it’s just been amazing. This year has been such a blessing. We were able to expand out here at the TruLight Youth Village. We started out the year being able to serve 35 kids and through the dedication, work and commitment of the community, as well as the team here, we were able to expand that to 10 more beds. I mean, that’s just huge. (It’s) 10 more kids that we can serve. We’ve always had the mindset that quantity is not our goal. We don’t want numbers. But we want to be able to help as many kids as we can with the resources that we’re given. So, being able to jump from 35 to 45 will also enable us to help more of the kids who we are seeing going into CWOP, which is Children Without Placement. That has definitely started to trend downward some, but the fact is that even one kid not having a place to go, is one too many. And so, we put 10 (additional) beds here to focus on trying to keep kids from even getting to that point,” said Ajasin.
Providing those services is one of the reasons why Ajasin says they are encouraging more end-of-year giving. She says they count on the generosity of the community to make sure that they can meet the needs of the children that the serve.
“This end-of-the-year give really gives us a good foothold to start 2024. We do our best here at TruLight with our foster families, with the activities and events that we do to support them, to the kids who live here at the true light Youth village, to our programs that reach out to kinship and biological families — we cannot do (any of) that without finances. I wish that I could say we don’t need the money, and we can just do it all day long. But the truth is, even our programs for the biological family members, those aren’t funded by anybody. Nobody’s stepping in to say, ‘hey, I’ll fund that for a year.’ So, everything that our team does that goes out there is about the kids. It’s about loving on them. And so, this time of the year when we are reaching out saying, ‘hey, we want you guys to consider doing an end of the year give to us,’ it is because we know 2024 is coming. And just like, God forbid, anything like COVID hit or inflation hit us even harder, we have to prepare for that. We have to be prepared, because what we don’t want is our kids to lose any quality,” said Ajasin.
The end-of-year giving not only helps these charities continue their work during the new year, but it also provides some tax benefit to those who give. To qualify for the 2023 tax deduction, the donation needs to be made by no later than Sunday, December 31.
Ajasin says, much like many other local charities, they have made it easy for people to give. She says you can mail in your donation, or you can give online by going to trulight127.org.
The other two charities that we mentioned in this story, are also offering ways for you to give online. End-of-year giving for Habitat for Humanity can be made at habitatgv.org, and donations to the Christian Cupboard can be made online at christiancupboardofseguin.org.
We highlighted those charities in this story, but that only begins to scratch the service of all of the deserving non-profit organizations also looking for donations to end 2023. If there’s a charity that you want to help, you can contact them directly to find out the best way to make your donation, so that they are better prepared for the new year.
You can catch our full conversation with Ajasin on this weekend’s Saturday Topic program on radio station KWED. The program airs at 8:30 a.m. Saturday on AM 1580 KWED, and live online at seguintoday.com.