Assistance League of St. Louis is run by an all-volunteer group of more than 500. The organization’s mission is to identify, develop, fund and implement ongoing philanthropic programs to serve specific needs of children and adults in the St. Louis community. Assistance League has served the St. Louis area for more than 30 years. In 2017 alone, Assistance League members and friends donated 80,000 volunteer hours through nine philanthropic programs, touching more than 44,000 lives.
Each Assistance League philanthropic program has a special focus from providing new school uniforms to shoes and socks and from personal care items for crisis shelter clients to teddy bears for comfort. Through the largest program, Operation School Bell, volunteers contributed 5,700 hours last year to give each student 22 clothing and personal care items. During the 2017-2018 school year, volunteers helped 7,834 elementary school students through this program. In November 2018, Assistance League announced the opening of 17 fully equipped closets in Saint Louis Public Schools to provide basic clothing and personal care needs even more quickly to 4,800 deserving elementary school students. These students, like thousands of others in the region, will also enjoy book fairs. Assistance League distributed 12,000 books to students last year.
Funds raised by Assistance League are returned to the St. Louis community. Assistance League of St. Louis is an accredited charity of the Better Business Bureau and has achieved a Platinum Transparency Rating from GuideStar. Fewer than one percent of the organizations GuideStar evaluates achieve a platinum rating. www.alstl.org.