Sugarplum Sled Inc.

The mission of the Sled is to assist low-income NYC public school students and their families. Nearly 90% of the students we assist are housing insecure, living in shelters or doubled or tripled up with other extended family in temporary housing. We deliver individualized assistance to children and their families who are identified to us through school professionals. The Sled provides nimble crisis support such as groceries, clothing, bedding, kitchen and cleaning supplies to fill in the gaps not addressed by government assistance. We aim to have the specific resources needed in the hands of the student's family within three days of referral. We also fulfill specific holiday gift wishes of over 1000 low-income and housing insecure NYC public school students each December.

We hope to minimize stress for families of NYC public school students who already find themselves in difficult circumstances. By providing crisis support, we enable families to focus their energy on more productive endeavors such as education and employment. We also hope to bring holiday cheer for children whose families have limited resources by getting them gifts that they personally select. In all that we do, we respect the desires of the students and families we assist and tailor our support to their exact needs and wishes.

Goal One: To improve communication with Department of Education staff members and shelter directors to identify NYC public school students and their families in need.

Goal Two: Identify shelters or schools with high rates of homeless students that we can add to our annual Sugarplum Sled drive.

We adopted certain softwares such as Quickbooks and Wix, that streamline data collection and expense tracking, allowing for better decision-making by leadership.

We have implemented new internal systems in the past 12 months to better track our budget, as well as communicate with donors and constituents. These new systems have made it easier to track spending in different crisis support categories, as well as track spending per student/family. Externally, we worked to include unaccompanied youth (young adults in the shelter system on their own) in the population of housing-insecure students that we assist. We forged connections with shelter directors at facilities that work with this population and had success in including them in our gift giving and crisis support outreach.