Welcome to Balance4kids!

Our Mission
The BALANCE organization will address the needs of children with severe disabilities in a collaborative model with private organizations, parents, and public schools working together. Individuals will benefit from support in the areas of nutrition, educational therapies, and alternative education.

Our Motivation
California's budget deficit has led to massive cut backs in education. Although special education is largely protected by specific mandates through the federal government, BALANCE4Kids seeks to support public education by "giving back" to the schools. The opportunity to provide instructional assistants enabled BALANCE4Kids to save the school districts that it currently serves, tens of thousands of dollars annually because we leave the profit margin in the schools. In addition we fund special education workshops to our staff throughout the year at no cost to the schools. BALANCE4Kids has been actively fundraising since 1999 to provide "above the basic" items and enrichment programs for special education classrooms in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties.

What We Do

BALANCE4kids:

• works with the community and the school system to provide services for students with disabilities.
• provides one-to-one instructional assistants for special-needs students from preschool to high school in the public schools. We endeavor to find the perfect match of aide to child, every time.
• provides one-to-one in-home respite workers for special needs consumer from preschoolers to highschoolers.
• BALANCE4Kids employees are certified in CPR and first aid and receive instructional workshops throughout the year. These workshops (funded by BALANCE4Kids) are presented by skilled behaviorists and special education specialists.
• has been actively fundraising since 1999 to provide "above the basic" items for special education classrooms in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties.
• is proud of its collaboration with the Ride A Wave organization (RAW). Since 2000 the RAW group has allowed us to join forces with them to take one hundred and fifty disabled children to the beach to experience surfing and kayaking.
• Through the hard work and effort of our many volunteers, BALANCE4Kids has sponsored gymnastics classes, provided gross motor occupational therapy equipment to five schools, purchased adaptive communication devices, completed computer modifications and issued computers, and supplied sensory-motor materials, adaptive PE equipment and fine motor occupational therapy games to children in various programs.
• BALANCE offers the KidQuest program (an all-inclusive friendship group) that it is funded by the State Council on Developmental Disabilities.
• BALANCE seeks to provide enrichment to the special needs children of Santa Cruz through the sponsorship of extra curricular field trips.