Pieces of the Puzzle

Hello Folks, and Happy New Year!

We receive lots of puzzle donations here at HiH, which means so do recipients (along with the table and chairs of course). If you enjoy puzzles, you understand the simple joy they can bring to an ordinary day. And perhaps you also understand the frustration of discovering a piece is missing after hours of work. 

We don’t want to deliver that future moment of aggravation to our neighbors, so volunteers assemble gently-used puzzles fully to make sure no pieces are missing before they are packed. This unique inspection task was completed dozens of times in 2025–by church youth groups (lots of kid puzzles!), at retirement homes, in workplace breakrooms, and by regular volunteers assembling them at home in between weekly shifts–marking them “complete” and grabbing a new puzzle to test.

When we celebrate New Years, there's a natural pause to reflect and take stock of the year that was…to consider how the yearly “puzzle” just passed can be marked “complete” before turning ahead towards the next one. With any luck (and a little attention), lessons learned from past puzzles help piece together entirely fresh ones. This is as true for non-profits as it is for you. At HiH, the puzzle of 2025 was quite a ride!

For just a moment, take in the full picture: 1,240 neighbors (roughly half of whom are children) in 420 households receiving over 700 beds. We transformed homes and lives while diverting around 200 tons of furniture from our landfill. Each of these numbers are records for HiH in our seven years.

But this barely scratches the surface! We know a whole is much greater than the sum of its puzzle pieces, but even the separate pieces for HiH last year are remarkable: 1,100 volunteers contributing 9,000 hours to ensure our inventory from over 2,000 item donors is in like-new condition.  Ready to be safely delivered all over town to neighbors hoping to build—or often rebuild—their own home. This way, they’ll have the crucial pieces of a bed, a desk and lamp, a couch, a baking sheet and more, among their resources. For every neighbor to experience the comfortable home that all deserve, each household “piece” becomes itself an intentionally crafted puzzle. It’s a dizzying, interconnected community with puzzles inside puzzles to create and solve!

The fun part (if you’re not already having fun)? You are an integral piece of this whole. Yes, we mean you, reading these words right now! However large or small your contribution may first appear, our work last year would be in some way less than whole without it. Even reading our newsletter makes the completed picture richer, enhanced by the light of your attention diverted from an internet AI landfill (see what I did there?). Now zoom out and consider that HiH’s work to improve our collective quality of life is itself merely a small piece of a large Johnson County puzzle. And so on and so on, from a global perspective all the way down to a jigsaw-shaped box on a refurbished coffee table down the block. Thought of this way, perhaps it’s not so outlandish to say: In telling your friend to donate their mattress instead of tossing it to the curb last year, you changed the world. 

To all of our recipients, volunteers, donors, supporters, sponsors and neighbors–you matter...far more than you (or even we) could know. You not only wholly belong in this community, you are essential to it. We could not have been quite complete in 2025 without your presence and contributions, in whatever form that took. The same is true for the new puzzle, made up of yet to be revealed pieces, that together we’ve already begun assembling in 2026. 

May that thought be as refreshing and invigorating for you as it is for us. And if you’ve recently made a resolution to volunteer on behalf of your neighbors this year, know there is a contribution at HiH that only you can make. There are plenty of seats at our puzzle table and it would be a pleasure to prepare you a welcome. That’s kinda our thing! After all…

Together we make it home.