Autumn Leaves Bunco is on its way!

The ticket price includes Bunco, light food and prizes!

Our Fall Gift Event shopping and packing starts in mid-October. We'd love to see your smiling face in our warehouse!

We start thinking about Christmas early around here as we need to get the items for the children packed up and out to the schools before they go on break for Christmas so our goal is to have all of our bags packed up the first two weeks of December and available for the schools to be picked up by mid-December.

My Joyful Heart does a traditional Giving Tree and would love your family's help or the help of your business, small group, school or church. We can give you one tag or hundreds. Each tag (whether paper or digital) will be aligned to a specific child enrolled in our program and will contain sizes to help get them warm PJs/Slippers, footwear that they need and an item from their Wish List.

We can also put together a list of most frequently requested items from our children if some of your people like to shop from Amazon or other source.

Please email Lecia at office2@myjoyfulheart.org to sign up for the Giving Tree.

If you would like to send or write letters to your sponsored kids, please email them to information@myjoyfulheart.org or send them via snail mail by September 30th to be included with the Back to School Gift Event.

Sponsoring a child is a unique opportunity to directly have an impact on a specific little one. For $35 a month or $420 a year, you can help bring hope to someone in need.

We are sharing with the children enrolled in our program the ways that they can Be the Light in their homes, classes, and communities.

We were blessed with light bulbs, courtesy of the ComEd Foodbank Program, during the Back-to-School Event and are looking for a mini flashlight for each of them for our Valentine's Day Event to help reinforce the message. We’ve popped a few onto our Amazon Wish List, but can use gently used smaller ones as well if you have any lying around collecting dust!

We finished up our Back-to-School Gift Event and are working toward getting the warehouse set up for the Fall Gift Event where we will welcome four new schools to the program and get the bags for the children ready with fall essentials and items to help them through a cold Chicago winter.

We are so thankful to our amazing volunteers getting it all out on time and with even more children to serve this coming year! We would love to have you join us and encourage you to start volunteering now!

We believe in recycling and reusing, and we love items from the community but please don’t use us as a place to dump things that we cannot use. We are especially interested in:

Coats in great, clean shape with working zippers, snaps and no holes, rips, tears.

Children’s Clothing (sizes 6-20) and

Adult Clothing (sizes S-4XL), but when donating adult clothing, we have to remember that it’s for children and young adults so jeans, pants, leggings, simple sweaters, sweatshirts, polos, etc. are great. We cannot use prom or wedding dresses. Our kids cannot afford to dry clean items.

Shoes and Boots in great condition are awesome but shoes that are smelly or have holes and worn-down heels are not something we share with the children.

Bedding, Blankets and Towels but please nothing stained, with holes or overly worn. We strive to give them items they can use for a long time.

Unbroken Toys and Games (with all pieces), Vehicles and Dolls. No extra-large toddler toys, many of our kids need to take their bags home on the bus, so heavy bags are difficult to transport.

Other things include purses, wallets, makeup bags, backpacks, brown paper grocery bags and books.

We accept many new items too (underwear, socks, PJs to name a few)!

We are so grateful to two groups for donations of hygiene packs: Elevation Church & Jim and Mary Remijas and their small groups and friends and family! St. John’s UCC donated some beautiful blankets, and the LWML Ladies of Trinity Lutheran Church donated some school bags for our back to school event.

Operation Nehemiah helped us solve one of our longstanding warehouse issues. We have thousands of hangers in the warehouse at any given time, many with clothing on them waiting to be sent to the children but over a thousand at any given time, empty waiting for the next seasons clothes. They can be a hazard when they overflow to the ground and they take quite a lot of volunteer time managing. The men spent hours prepping, designing and a half day creating two different solutions for us. We are beyond thankful to have worked with them and overjoyed at the results to keep us organized and keep our volunteers safe.

We would love the help of collecting the following for our next event (or if you know anyone in a company that might have product donations, please connect us):

Adventures with Jesus, written by our very own Diane Carroll, is available for purchase for $10 for local pickup at My Joyful Heart or can be shipped for an additional $6. All proceeds will benefit the children of My Joyful Heart.

My Joyful Heart Swag! We have t-shirts, sweatshirts and cute cuddly bears for you. Easy ordering online.

Or stop in our warehouse to see our Tiniest Boutique for other fun items!

Don't forget to watch the 2022 released video of My Joyful Heart! Please share far and wide to spread our joy!!