07/08/2025
Greetings to our Florence Be Helpful Family,
�I would like to begin by thanking the parents who trusted us, the remarkable staff that served the children and community plus the 1500+ different riders from 2012 to this year in the great Florence County. We have absolutely loved transporting your God-gifts all these years & it has been our honor to carry the future leaders of Florence County and the nation in our buses.
In every sense of the way, there has never been a program that so creatively saw a need and filled it in such a way as to strengthen this community. From its humble beginning in the community of Evergreen in 2004, then to Waverly Street in Florence, Be Helpful served over 900 different individuals and their families as an after-school care program. Be Helpful transitioned to only transportation in 2012 when we began picking up children from 18 different schools and safely delivering them to 15+ Florence day-cares, City of Florence Centers, Boys & Girls Clubs, and after-school activities.
Be Helpful made it possible for not only parents, but grandparents, foster parents, and low-income families to not take time away from work to sit in long car lines, or struggle to find a way to get their children to day-care. We also were able to take on the cost with insurance for transporting children, so day-cares did not have to take on that expense. In turn, childcare costs remained more affordable for the county. We reduced latch-key children going home to empty homes. We partnered with programs like The Boys and Girls club to help homeless students have access to free summer camps. We helped keep children safe, fed, well cared for, and nurtured by programs that enriched their lives. Our Be Helpful slogan was “Doing what no one can or dare do”. No other transportation hit the regional, city, religious, private and public day-cares boxes in the nation we have been told.
2020 was our best year, then Covid happened, the beginning of the end as well. Day-cares received thousands of dollars of Federal and state assistance for a couple of years while we did not receive anything. Truly, that was the first year of any profit when mostly we ended the year with less than thousand dollars in the bank. When you take out insurance, labor cost, bus repairs, and many unplanned expenses it has been unbearable these past five years.
With such a great history serving our community, it comes with great sorrow to announce that we are not currently able to continue the service to our outstanding day-cares and students in Florence for this school year.
This decision has not come without prayers, tears, frustrations, and sadness. Our cost of transportation, insurance, and repairs has tripled over the years. We tried & were greatly shocked, but we have not currently been successful, getting a grant or any dollars from federal, state, city or even any local financially blessed individuals for this great ministry and this great non-profit that serves the red, yellow, black and white with love and purpose. All our pleas for financial assistance have reached dead ends.
We wish to thank Bryan & Kim Chapman for their support for this great ministry since inception and for giving it the Be Helpful heartbeat to love on all of God’s children and their families.
My prayer, and theirs, is that somebody will take up our place in transportation or that God will provide a way for Be Helpful to restart in Florence in the future.
To God be the Glory,
Harry Graham
President
