On the morning of Wednesday, December 31, the last day of 2014, the low temperature in Cleveland, Georgia, where our partner Caring Hands Ministries is located was 29 degrees.

The forecast for the first week in January 2015 there also calls for low temperatures below freezing.

Imagine being a parent with young children, a senior citizen on a fixed income, or a disabled veteran, waking up on that subfreezing morning in a house with no heat or electricity.

Can you put yourself in the place of a person having to choose between putting food on their table or paying their rent so they don’t get evicted from their home in the middle of winter with no place to turn?

Between those two dire choices, paying a utility bill is a distant third.

But thanks you in 2014, we at Americans Helping Americans® were able to keep the lights on and the furnace running for hundreds of households in the most poverty-stricken regions of West Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and Kentucky through our emergency utility assistance program.

In addition to helping prevent those at risk from literally freezing to death in their own homes, keeping the power on in a house means a family can enjoy a warm meal and use portable electric heaters and electric blankets to keep them toasty warm inside no matter the temperature outside.

This past fall, we heard from Caring Hands Ministries executive director Ann Fleming who told us that our emergency utilities assistance funding kept the electricity on for one of their clients, suffering from cancer, who needs a respirator to survive and no electricity would mean no oxygen.

“That could have ended his life in hours,” Fleming told us.

But thanks to you, Fleming has saved a text on her phone that she received from the client after his overdue electric bill was paid before the company disconnected his service.

“We’re going to be all right now. We’re going to make it.”

On behalf of Brian, and hundreds of other households throughout the poorest regions of our country, we say thank you for helping them “make it” through another cold Appalachian winter.

Won’t you help make it a warm and happy new year for your fellow Americans so that they won’t have to make that terrible choice between food, shelter or heat or even life and death?  Please give today…