HUGS St. Johns

Mission: To raise awareness about local student poverty, working closely with school counselors to identify students in crisis, and organizing community efforts to provide essential assistance.

HUGS St. Johns (previously Hugs Across the County) is an ALL-VOLUNTEER 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in St. Johns County, Florida. For more than 10 years, HUGS has worked closely with the St. Johns County School District and other nonprofits, including the Betty Griffin Center, to identify and provide emergency assistance to children-in-need, including the 400+ considered homeless. HUGS provides emergency clothing bags to 500+ St. Johns County kids-in-need every year, and we also provide emergency food to thousands of local children each year.

HUGS volunteers work hard to provide:

• Emergency Clothing Care Packages filled with one week of new and gently used clothing, new shoes, new undies, full size toiletries and school supplies.
• Emergency food through our 13 school-based pantries
• Holiday break food through our annual No Hungry Holidays food distribution to 1,000+ St. Johns County children identified by their school counselors.
• Empowerment lunch and learn programming for at-risk middle school students
• Brand new diverse books for K-5th grade students at Title 1 elementary schools