Award-winning, multi-published author Karen McCullough writes for several publishers in a variety of romance subgenres: suspense, mystery, fantasy and paranormal. Her releases include “A Vampire’s Christmas Carol” in the paranormal Christmas anthology Beneath a Christmas Moon, Shadow of a Doubt and Wizard’s Bridge.

Still Karen makes time for a number of nonprofit organizations, including Covenant House, which she has been supporting for 15 to 20 years now.

Hi, Karen. Thank you so much for taking time from your busy schedule to join us at Novel Hearts. Could you please tell us exactly what Covenant House does?

Covenant House provides a variety of services to homeless and runaway youth to provide safe shelter from gangs, pimps, drug traffickers, and others who would exploit and abuse them.

From its Web site: “In addition to food, shelter, clothing and immediate crisis care, Covenant House provides a variety of services to homeless, runaway and throwaway youth including medical care, educational and vocational programs, drug abuse treatment and prevention programs, legal aid services, recreation programs, mother/child programs, transitional living programs, life-skills training and street outreach.”

What an incredible organization. I already know the answer to this question but, in your words, why is this work important?

The easy answer to why the work of Covenant House is important is that our youth are our future. Without intervention many of these young people would end up dead or in prison. Covenant House helps them find a different path to a happy and productive life.

But I think the real reason its work is important goes deeper than that. Covenant House puts in practice the principle that all people have value in the sight of God. Even those who seem to be at the bottom of the barrel are important to God and, therefore, should be important to all of us. Teenagers often fall through the cracks of society. They’re not as attractively innocent as small children. They’re too close to being adult for that. And yet those who end up on the street aren’t really ready to cope with an adult society on their own. Often they’ve been victimized or abandoned by the people who should’ve protected them. To a society that values people by what they can do or what they can produce, the youth Covenant House serves appear to offer little. The gospel tells us we’re using the wrong criteria.

Those are beautiful words indeed, Karen. Thank you.

In addition to Covenant House, are there other nonprofit organizations you support?

Another of my favorite charities is Food for the Poor, which provides food, housing, health care, education, water projects, emergency relief and micro-enterprise assistance for the poorest of the poor in the Caribbean and Latin American countries. I also support my local Catholic Church, Our Lady of Grace.

Thank you for everything you do to support the community, Karen.

How can readers get in touch with you to learn more about you and your books?

My Web site is at http://www.kmccullough.com and my e-mail is karen@kmccullough.com.

And how can readers learn more about Covenant House and Food for the Poor?

The Web site for Covenant House is at http://www.covenanthouse.com. Food for the Poor is at http://www.foodforthepoor.org.

Karen, thanks again for stopping by Novel Hearts to tell us about Covenant House and Food for the Poor. Very best wishes to you, and thank you again for everything you do to support these nonprofits.

Novel Hearts is a forum to raise awareness of the charitable causes some of our favorite authors support. Each month, we’ll chat with one or two authors about the nonprofit organizations they help, either with time, money and/or materials.

If there’s an author you’d like to see featured on the blog, please send me the author’s e-mail address and the name of the nonprofit organization he or she supports. You can reach me at BooksByPatricia@Yahoo.com. Thank you!