A little Kids to Kids help lets youth go a long way

Run by children to help their peers around the world, the nonprofit organization Kids to Kids is much more than a passing whim by schoolchildren.

Since its founding in 2005, it has funded more than 230 small projects, helping more than 12,000 children in the Caribbean and Central America. In the coming year, it expects to distribute $200,000 in 10 countries.

“I know a lot of the volunteers who have used them,’’ said Moriah Washington, 26, the Peace Corps volunteer who received a grant for her after-school program in San Pedro de Poás, Costa Rica.

“It was just $500, but $500 goes a long way there. It allowed me to run the program from February to August.’’

The Kids to Kids venture has worked so well that mothers in the Boston area are mobilizing with a similar model. This month, the mothers’ program awarded the first grants to fund projects designed to help communities in poor countries to improve maternal and child health.

Founded by sisters Julia and Emilia Haney and Emily and Sarah Nuss, Kids to Kids raises money in the Boston area and beyond, with everything from bake sales to fund drives.

A six-member children’s advisory board considers every proposal for grants. And now, children across the country can vote online on the best proposals, all of them submitted by Peace Corps volunteers in the field.

Julia Haney, now 17 and a high school junior, said the projects she likes best are the ones that “empower girls’ groups.’’ In March, she and eight other members of Kids to Kids traveled to the Dominican Republic and met members of a girls’ softball team that got a Kids to Kids grant of $491 for baseball gloves and bats.

“After they receive the grant, they send us stories from these girls who have completely grown into themselves,’’ said Julia, whose younger brother, Finn, is also a member of the group.

The origins of Kids to Kids go back seven or eight years, when Julia and Emily Nuss started collecting discarded children’s eyeglasses to send to poor countries.

That project inspired the girls’ parents to begin mounting medical missions to remote villages in the Dominican Republic. The work grew into a nonprofit organization, now called World Connect, with a budget of more than $1 million this year.

“The kids were the genesis, and they’ve been kind of leading us forward,’’ said Bill Haney, an entrepreneur and filmmaker who is the father of Julia, Emilia, and Finn. “Given the scale of the challenges and the limited resources we have, the kids instinctively were trying to figure out how to do a lot with a little.’’

Haney said he and the mother of Emily and Sarah, Dr. Kim Wilson, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Boston, first went to the Dominican Republic for medical missions in 2003. Soon, the girls conceived their group and collected sports equipment and arts supplies for their parents to take to children in the villages.

The girls eventually came along on a mission to give out the material they had collected and to help their parents.

“By the end, they had given their own clothes and their backpacks, everything but their skins,’’ Haney recalled.

The next year, the four girls connected with a Peace Corps program that takes requests to fund projects from volunteers in the field. Joshua Field, a Peace Corps spokesman in Washington, said the Peace Corps set up its Partnership Program to allow donation of funds to specific projects and to create longer-term partnerships that will last beyond the stay of the volunteer.

“The Kids to Kids program has provided generous funding that helped ensure the success and sustainability of many of these grass-roots Peace Corps Partnership projects,’’ Field said.

Kids to Kids limits its donations to $500 per project, and one was as small as $34.

Jacqueline Caglia, director of development for World Connect and a former Peace Corps volunteer, said Kids to Kids has awarded two rounds of grants over the past three years, giving away about $25,000 per cycle. The program has expanded into Africa and Asia.

Sarah Henry, executive director of World Connect, said the power of Kids to Kids lies in leveraging contributions quickly and precisely. “Kids in the US can throw a bake sale or recycle cans, and the money they raise can reach right into the heart of a community thousands of miles away,’’ Henry said.

James F. Smith writes about Boston’s global ties. His blog is at boston.com/worldlyboston. He can be reached at jsmith@globe.com.