Wheeler:  Average yearly cost of providing More at Four services to help an at-risk 4-year-old be ready for school in North Carolina: $5,031. Average yearly cost of housing a convict in a North Carolina prison: $27,000.

Wheeler:  Cross Point Community Church workers help feed people and clean up a homeless camp so that the property owner will be less likely to evict those who have built crude but elaborate living quarters in South Raleigh.

After every school dance, Broughton High School Principal Stephen Mares used to worry all night, wondering whether his phone would ring in the early hours with a weary voice using the words "student," "alcohol," "accident."

Immediately, my eye was drawn to the first name on the list of charities and universities the Pope Foundation blessed with $1.2 million in grants last year.

Amber Smith has a dream - a dream that every American will make acts of service as much a part of everyday life as eating.

Wheeler:  The hurt, the pain, the yearning for connection - Randi Rubenstein has seen all the ways ill-equipped parents can damage children.

Naturally, I picked up a baby blanket with no price tag on it. The chatty cashier, taking heed of the line, rang up a slightly cheaper baby item twice so we wouldn't have to wait for a price check.

Wheeler:  Every one of your more than 140 email messages detailing a donation to a local charity was a gift to our community - from the $9,800 a family foundation spread among 15 nonprofit groups to the $10 that 11-year-old Ross Bechtel saved from his allowance and sent to the Food Bank.

More than a decade had passed since Linda Williams last visited a dentist, so even with a numb mouth and a looming tooth extraction, she was grateful to be sitting in a dental chair inside a bus in the parking lot of Alliance Medical Ministry.

"Come home" were the last words Erin Timmermans spoke to her husband before he deployed to Afghanistan last month, a day after their impromptu wedding at the Wake County courthouse.

Wheeler:  Drive is one thing Vanessa Condry is not lacking, even if she couldn't find it on the gear shift when she took possession of her manual 1998 Honda Accord in October, thanks to Wheels4Hope, one of the local charities seeking help on The N&O's Holiday Guide to Giving at bit.ly/givingguide

Wheeler:  The Women's Center of Wake County is located in a downtown Raleigh basement, where it provides basic necessities, support and housing help for homeless women or those at risk of homelessness.

Wheeler:  The streets around the Helping Hand Mission off Rock Quarry Road occupy the mind of Sylvia Wiggins - the small homes packed along them her heart, and the people inside them her soul.

The man's name I have never known, though he visits my wonderings quite frequently. Could he ever have realized the generations-long ramifications of just one decision he made on what was probably one ordinary day of his life?

Wheeler:  Given the growth in unemployment, poverty and home foreclosures, there can be little doubt that the holidays this year will be a trying time for a stunning number of Triangle families.

Fairly early in my pregnancy, on the very day I first let myself walk wide-eyed around Babies R Us, I began having signs of a miscarriage.

If it's the second weekend of November, it means I'm in Myrtle Beach making a fool of myself during my annual Christmas-shopping extravaganza, which always involves an embarrassing amount of M&Ms and so many bladder-busting moments of hilarity that Depends were dispensed one year.