Page 14 - 2025 February report

LOI Reviews (2)
12
Subject: Happy Hands Education Center
From: kingjordan@comcast.net <kingjordan@ comcast.net>
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2025 3:31 PM
I reviewed the Happy Hands Education Center LOI and spent time on their website.
The LOI was submitted 11/19/2024 and the request was for $25,000 for a program with total costs of $763,900. The request is for scholarships. The website states that they have never turned away a potential student for lack of funds for tuition. Tuition differs according to the program. There are three separate programs: Birth to age 2, PreK3/ PreK/4 and Grades K-3rd. General scholarship need for the three programs totals $763,900. The LOI indicates that they would match the JSF grant.
The website shows their mission is “to empower children who are Deaf or hard of hearing to flourish in school and in life.” Nothing that I could find in their LOI or their Website shows anything related to education after the third grade. There is very positive discussion about the early intervention they make for children and how they work with siblings and parents to help them communicate with a child. Their philosophy is a good one, but it isn’t clear to me what happens to the children after they finish 3rd grade at Happy Hands. They say in the LOI that they have testimonies from former students and parents “of the successes they are experiencing and the exciting careers and opportunities they are achieving.” However, there are no examples of these testimonies included in the LOI or in the Website. Their focus is on helping the students develop a first language and become readers and writers.
When writing in the LOI about how they would determine whether or not the program succeeded, they state that their main determination of the success of their program is enrollment. They aim to have full enrollment each year and to do so must offer scholarships. They do state that they evaluate students individually with a battery of tests to measure language development, social
emotional skills, basic reading and math skills and ASL/speech skills but these evaluations and assessments do not relate to their LOI.
They learned about us through a grants search engine and while they do not state this, they must send out a large number of similar LOIs to other foundations in order to raise more than 3⁄4 million dollars each year.
I don’t see any real connection between what they do and what our mission states and would continue to decline the LOI.
One additional fact about Happy Hands that is mentioned in the LOI but without any additional information is the revenue and expenses from the year prior. As of June 2024, they show:
Total Revenue - $1,632,823.52 Total Expenses - $1,788,625.54
This shows a deficit of $155,802.02
This deficit had nothing to do with my opinion that we should decline the LOI, but it is a not small amount.