Baby It’s Cold Inside: It Shouldn’t Take A Bank to Heat a Home
Heat-Up St. Louis, Inc., is a non-profit 501(c)(3) charity that focuses on helping area elderly and disabled people, and low-income families, with their delinquent heating bills in Missouri and Illinois in the St. Louis region, that began its operations in December 2000. 100% of all public and private donations go to helping the needy. Our diverse all-volunteer board of directors underwrite all administrative expenses related to the execution of each winter and summer program. Our mission is to provide utility counsel, referrals, heat (winter) and cooling (summer) grants to restore a primary home heating source during the winter and assist with air-conditioners, and payments on high electric bills in the summer for at-risk households.
The needy includes the working poor and those Americans who may be temporarily laid-off or often trapped in a economic crisis. Our charities provide a safety net in a region which often does not have enough federal, state or utility funds to help keep the needy connected to their utility services.
Being without heat in the winter and cooling in the summer has become a serious community-wide problem involving real health and safety issues. This is not just an urban issue, needy families in the burbs and rural areas also suffer with economic woes, and therefore are challenged by their local utility bills. Winter time is also a time period which has more home and apartment fires than any other time of the year. Often due to the fact that many people will use unsafe methods of heating their homes, including stealing natural gas, or electric, which is against the law.
Those qualified recipients of our funds would prefer to have the ability to pay. If they are seniors and the disabled, they are held hostage by high medical, prescription and grocery bills. The utilities currently do not provide any special rates for them. The Heat-Up St. Louis and Cool Down St. Louis charities network with about 34 area qualified and professionally run community action and social service agencies in 40 Missouri and Illinois counties, including the City of St. Louis. They use our grants to help supplement the needy’s home energy bills. Our grants often are the sole life-line which keeps heat on in the winter and electricity on in the summer. Every cent donated goes towards helping the needy.
Tax-deductible donations are made by direct bank-mail contributions to Heat-Up St. Louis in care of UMB Bank, P.O. Box 868, St. Louis, MO 63188 and through various public special event fundraisers. Year-round you can also drop-off a donation to any teller at a Missouri and Illinois UMB Bank locations. Also individuals can remember the needy through their will, please see your attorney, and you can also charge it on our secured web site.
The Volunteer office will provide you a receipt for your IRS deductions. Volunteers are the life-blood of our organizations. Heat-Up and Cool Down seeks volunteers throughout the year. Also, the charities need retail and or commercial businesses who would like to engage their customer base through various donation campaigns. We do not accept fans, or space heaters, they are dangerous.
Heat-Up St. Louis, Inc., is a year-round program. During the summer, Cool Down St. Louis focuses on providing cooling grants and public education to help families with small children, disabled and the elderly avoid heat deaths and illnesses. Because this is an ongoing program, most of the donations go almost immediately to our networking social service and community action agencies in Missouri and Illinois.
Heat-Up St. Louis is also committed to educating the public on utility consumer issues. In addition, the non-for-profit organization works with the media through sponsorships and public service announcements. Heat-Up St. Louis is currently working with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its Community Matters program. In addition, the St. Louis American and Suburban Journals provide ongoing public service display advertisements.
Please review other sections for media sponsorships and support. You may request in advance to inspect our IRS forms 1023, and 990 by coming to our donated office space ( must call first) during regular volunteer business hours. If you need energy assistance, utility counsel or referrals — from Missouri or Illinois call our Resource Hotline, during regular volunteer business hours, at 314-241-7668. We can not respond to energy assistance inquiries over the Internet. Our Resource Hotline is supported by a multi-voice mail system during overloads or when a volunteer is not available. Thank you.
