Every Roof We Replace This Year Sends $200 to North Alabama Foster Kids

In 2004, Lee Marshall was sitting in a newsroom at WHNT-19 in Huntsville with a folder full of stories about kids in foster care — kids who needed a coat, a backpack, a bed — and she made a decision that most journalists never make. She decided that reporting on the problem wasn't enough. She put down the microphone and started the Kids to Love Foundation. That was twenty years ago. The foundation is still running, still in Madison, Alabama, and still run by Lee Marshall.

Ridgeline Construction's Athens office is writing a $200 check to Kids to Love for every full residential roof replacement we sell between June 1 and December 31, 2026. That's the program. Everything else in this article is context — and it's worth reading.

Lee Marshall Had a Choice

She'd spent years covering the Alabama foster care system as a journalist. The stories were real. The need was documented. The reporting was good work. But good documentation of a bad situation eventually stops being enough.

In 2004, Marshall left television and founded Kids to Love with a project so concrete it almost sounds small: backpacks full of school supplies for foster children heading into a new school year. That was it. One program, one back-to-school season, one county.

Twenty years later, Kids to Love is a full nonprofit headquartered in Madison, Alabama — which sits about halfway between Huntsville and Athens on Highway 72 — with a staff, a residential home, a career-training program, scholarships, a Christmas drive that reaches thousands of children, and a reach that runs across Alabama and into neighboring states. Not because the mission expanded. Because Lee Marshall kept building the thing she started.

What Kids to Love Actually Built

The backpack program is still running. But it's the smallest thing on the list now.

Davidson Farms Home for Girls is the centerpiece: a long-term residential home in Madison County for teenage girls who have aged out of, or are aging out of, the traditional foster care system. Teen girls are statistically the hardest population to place. The usual answer for a seventeen-year-old with no placement is a group home, a sequence of temporary situations, and then nothing — the system releases them at eighteen with whatever they have, which is usually not much. Davidson Farms is a different answer. It's a real home with full-time staff where girls can finish high school, figure out what comes next, and have adults in their corner while they do it.

KTECH is the foundation's career-training arm. It runs hands-on skills programs in trades and back-office work for foster youth who need a job and a path. Several North Alabama employers have hired KTECH graduates. The program is built on a simple premise: a kid who ages out of foster care at eighteen with no work history, no driver's license, and no family network needs more than good intentions. They need a skill and a foot in a door.

The scholarship fund closes the gap between federal aid and the real cost of college or technical school for foster youth who want to keep going. Christmas for the Kids delivers real gifts — from each child's actual wish list, not generic donations — to thousands of children in foster care every December. The backpack program runs every August. And alongside all of it, Kids to Love funds therapy and trauma counseling for kids who need it, because almost every child in the foster system does and the state doesn't pay for nearly enough of it.

That's what one decision in 2004 built. Not one program. Seven of them.

The Kids This Is For

Here's the moment that actually sticks. Not a statistic. A backpack.

A kid moves into a new foster placement two weeks into the school year. Third school this year. She walks in with whatever fit in a trash bag, which is how a lot of kids in the system carry their things between placements. No supplies. No backpack. She's starting over, again, at a school where nobody knows her name yet.

The backpack isn't solving the larger problem. It's not pretending to. But when that kid walks into a classroom with a full backpack of supplies for the first time in the school year, it gives her one less thing to be behind on. One less thing that marks her as different. That's a small thing that costs about fifteen dollars to make happen.

Multiply that by the number of kids Kids to Love serves across North Alabama each year — across Limestone, Madison, Morgan, and the surrounding counties — and the math starts to matter.

Why an Athens Roofing Company, Not a National Charity

Ridgeline has been in North Alabama since 2012. Our office is in Athens, Alabama. Our crews live in Limestone and Madison counties. The kids Kids to Love serves are at the school down the road from where our guys' own kids go. That's the geography argument, and it's the only one that matters.

A lot of roofing companies our size make one donation a year to a national charity and put a logo on their website. We did the opposite — something small, specific, and tied directly to work we're already doing. Something repeatable. Every full residential roof replacement our Athens office sells triggers a $200 donation. We write the check. The homeowner's price doesn't move.

We wrote it down because vague commitments don't hold. This one does.

Here's What $200 Does

Two hundred dollars is twelve backpacks fully loaded for back-to-school. It's four Christmas gifts picked off a real kid's wish list, wrapped and delivered before December 25. It's a block of therapy sessions for a kid who's been through enough that therapy isn't optional — it's necessary. It's the kind of tools or coursework that gets a KTECH trainee one step closer to a job offer.

It's not the whole answer for any one child. But every full roof we replace this year sends $200 to a foundation that knows exactly what to do with it. That's not a metaphor. That's a check with Lee Marshall's organization on the memo line, and it comes from every roof we put on in North Alabama through December 31.

How to Help Whether You Need a Roof or Not

If you're not in the market for a roof right now, you can still support Kids to Love directly. They take donations year-round at kidstolove.org. Every November they publish Christmas wish lists that anyone can sponsor — specific gifts for specific kids. Davidson Farms runs volunteer days. And if you're a North Alabama employer, KTECH is producing graduates who are ready to work.

Our $200-per-roof commitment doesn't replace any of that. It runs alongside it. But if you do need a new roof and you're in our service area, the donation follows the work.

The Fine Print (There Isn't Much)

Ridgeline Construction is a family-owned, woman-owned roofing contractor based in Athens, Alabama, serving North Alabama since 2012. GAF President's Club (top 1% of GAF contractors). BBB Torch Award for Ethics, North Alabama, 2023. BBB A+ Rated.