A border crossing in January 2019. A family of four. A phone with 4% battery.
The Khalil family crossed the Bela–Medyka border point in a snowstorm with two daughters, one backpack, and documentation stamped in three languages none of them read fluently. They had an address in Chicago from a cousin they hadn't spoken to in six years.
Our founder, Marisol Vega-Torres — whose own mother had crossed a different border with a different backpack in 1987 — met them at a transit shelter in Warsaw. She had $200 in her pocket and a group chat with forty diaspora friends.
That group chat became Hearth. The $200 became the Khalil family's first month of groceries, a SIM card, and a bus ticket to the airport. Today, their eldest daughter Nadia is studying nursing in Illinois. She still has the coat someone donated that winter.
"We didn't build a charity. We built a table — and kept pulling out chairs."
— Marisol Vega-Torres, Founder
2,847
families resettled since that January