Hands Together A Center For Children

The morning starts on Civic Center Drive with the sound of five classrooms waking up. In one, an eight-week-old is settling into a teacher's arms while her mother heads to a shift she cannot afford to miss. Down the hall, toddlers are wrestling with jacket zippers to get outside, where a garden that neighborhood volunteers built is still producing, and a hand-built playhouse has become the most negotiated piece of real estate on the playground.

This is Hands Together, A Center for Children. We have been in the heart of Santa Ana since 1999, caring for nearly 90 children a day, from six weeks old through four years old, while their parents work.

These are the years that shape everything. A child who is talked to, read to, held, and fed well before the age of five walks into kindergarten ready. Our teachers know this, which is why the work looks the way it does here: small hands mixing paint, a book read three times because a two-year-old asked, a toddler who arrived in June not speaking much and now will not stop telling you about the worms in the garden.

We hold a 5-Star rating from Quality Start OC, the highest available. That rating is not a plaque on the wall. It reflects teachers who stay, classrooms that are planned rather than improvised, and a standard of care our families deserve and rarely get offered.

Santa Ana built this place alongside us. Volunteers from the Zonta Club of Newport Harbor spent three Saturday mornings turning a bare strip of ground into a garden the children now tend themselves. First American and Habitat for Humanity of Orange County built and donated the playhouse. Every one of those gifts started the same way yours would, with someone deciding these children were worth their morning.

Whatever you give today goes straight into a classroom room with a child in it. We are grateful for the chance to do this work, and grateful for the kindness that keeps it going.

Thank you for bringing a little more joy to Civic Center Drive!