Imagine you’re a 7-year-old boy. Your mom is single and works two jobs. You have a couple of brothers, so things are pretty tight—you don’t complain when dinner is just macaroni and cheese. Your mom got sick in August and had to stay home from work for a few days. She doesn’t get paid for days she doesn’t work, so her paycheck was short and the gas bill didn’t get paid. In September, you went back to school with no hot water for showers. The house is cold—it’s horrible taking a cold bath in a cold house. Your room is coldest of all because your brother accidentally broke your bedroom window. You dread crawling out from under the blankets on Monday morning, even with three or four pairs of socks between your feet and the cold floor, and you’re so tired of hearing the kids at school call you stinky. By January, getting up and going to school seems impossible. Your mom has to be at work at 7, so you just keep pulling the covers over your head and going back to sleep. Then you get pulled into truancy court for missing three weeks of school ...

A similar case came before Susan Block during her tenure as administrative judge of the St. Louis County Family Court. Most truancy cases, she says, are symptomatic of concrete—and easily addressed—problems. One little girl was too mortified to go to school because her family couldn’t afford to buy her underwear. One boy cut gym class because students were required to wear black sweatpants and a white T-shirt and he only had one of each.

“There are children who don’t have winter coats, who don’t have proper shoes,” Block says. “There are children who don’t have enough clothing, so they are embarrassed to wear the same clothing every day. There are kids who lose their glasses. Medicaid will provide for one pair of glasses, but if they lose those—well, they’re on their own.”

Block became increasingly frustrated as she watched fixable problems hinder these kids’ education—their surest ticket out of poverty. Little money was earmarked for these small, urgent problems, and fixing them required so much paperwork that it was impractical for such pressing needs as tutoring, glasses and gas bills.

This is why Block and a group of like-minded lawyers started Caring for Kids, a nonprofit that celebrated its first birthday in November. The organization provides a safety net for kids who have nowhere else to turn. It’s streamlined so as to channel as much money as possible to the kids; a United Way grant provides for one employee, program director Lara Perkins, who receives referrals from a court liaison and then works with the executive director and board to get the child’s needs met as quickly as possible.

Block asked one little boy what would make him more interested in coming to school, and he answered instantly: “If I could be in the band.” “His parents had no money to rent him or buy him an instrument,” she says, “so we got him a trombone. He’s now the first trombonist in his section—and he is regularly attending school and achieving academically.”

She adds that keeping a kid’s feet warm or providing a bus pass doesn’t just help in the here and now. These gestures remind children that they aren’t abandoned, that they matter, that they deserve to be healthy and happy. That sense of optimism is something they can keep for a lifetime.