Group help kids who lost parents
Buying a backpack to replace last year’s tattered one may be a luxury that some households, suffering from the recent loss of a parent, can no longer afford.
Yatooma’s Foundation For The Kids, a nonprofit organization founded in 2003, launched its inaugural Back to School program this fall.
Founder Norman Yatooma said last month 115 children received more than $6,000 worth of new school supplies from the foundation, which provides financial and emotional support to families in southeast Michigan.
“These kids are all going back to school now,” Yatooma said. “Most of these kids couldn’t even begin to afford a backpack – much less afford to fill it.”
Twenty-year-old Taneka Tate, mother of three and caretaker of her three siblings, recently received three backpacks filled with school supplies from the foundation.
Tate, whose family became a beneficiary of the foundation early this year, lost her mother in October 2007 from complications related to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – thickening of the heart muscle.
With two children and another on the way, Tate moved to Michigan and obtained legal custody of her three siblings, now ages 7, 11, and 17.
“I basically did what I had to do,” Tate said. “It’s life.”
Tate said her mother’s former employer learned about Yatooma’
S foundation on the Internet and wrote to the organization asking for assistance for the family.
Tate said the foundation primarily provided financial support to her family but also tried restoring some sense of normalcy in the children’s lives and “keeping their minds off things” with all-inclusive camping trips and tickets to basketball games.
Yatooma’s foundation, which now provides services to more than 500 children who have recently lost one or both parents, had its modest beginnings rooted at a kitchen table discussion.
Yatooma was 20 when his father was murdered in a car-jacking incident.
Overnight, he found himself faced with the daunting task of filling his father’s shoes as he and his mother dealt with financial troubles in addition to taking care of his three younger brothers.
“We lost everything – first our dad, and then our security to some degree,” Yatooma said. “For the next decade, we were cobbling our life back together.”
The foundation, headquartered in Birmingham, is run by a volunteer staff of more than 200. Yatooma hopes to go beyond southeastern Michigan in the coming years.
“We hope to have a foundation office in every state in America,” Yatooma said. “We’re growing and going in that direction.”
THANK YOU SO MUCH TO THE MANY SUPPORTERS OF YATOOMA’S FOUNDATION FOR THE KIDS WHO MADE OUR EXTREME CHRISTMAS MAKEOVER SO SUCCESSFUL AND MEANINGFUL FOR THE COSME AND ANTHONY FAMILIES!
