Who Benefits from Your Texas Lottery Ticket?

When you play the lottery online at theLotter Texas, you are buying official Texas Lottery tickets online. Your lottery play will therefore benefit state programs in the same way as when purchasing your tickets in person at a local retailer.

The Texas Lottery has made it a mission to allocate a large proportion of its ticket sales revenue towards funding social and economic programs that benefit all Texans, with priority given to education and veterans services. Listed below are some of the ways the Texas Lottery is helping residents of the state of Texas.

Texas Education

Your Texas Lottery tickets go towards a lot more than just making great lottery ads. Each year, 25.5% of state lottery income is contributed to public education in Texas. Since 1997, the Texas Lottery has allocated over $27 billion in revenue to the Foundation School Fund. The Texas Educational Agency steers lottery funds towards school equipment, bilingual and special education programs, teacher salaries, programs for the gifted and talented, career and technical education, education for the homeless, and many more programs that help the children of the state grow and reach their full potential. This state program provides aid to more than 1,000 school districts and 200 charter holders, and supports the education of over 5.3 million students in Texas each year.

An example of one the many programs the Texas Lottery helps fund through the Foundation School Fund is Early College High School (ECHS). The program’s aim is to increase college readiness and enrollment by assisting Texas students who are the least likely to attend college. The program incorporates both high school and college coursework, giving these students the opportunity to earn a high school diploma and either an associate degree or at least 60 college credit hours toward a baccalaureate degree.

At no cost to the students, ECHS provides the academic and social support services they need to help them increase their college readiness, reduce barriers to college access, and academically succeed in a college setting.

Amachi Mentoring. This program provides one-to-one mentoring for children ages 6–14 whose parents or family members are incarcerated or recently released from the prison system. The program’s main objective is to help these at-risk children break the cycle of incarceration, encourage positive behavior, and strengthen the child’s personal and social life. The Amachi program helps these children by providing them with caring mentors from school districts, faith-based organizations, nonprofit partnerships, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Prison Fellowship and Re-Entry programs across Texas. These mentors help foster healthy relationships that focus on reducing delinquency behavior, improving educational development, and encouraging the children’s social well-being and mental health.

Texas Veterans Services

Another state program that the Texas Lottery supports is the Texas Veterans Commission. Since 2009, the Texas Lottery’s Veteran Games, which benefit the Texas Veterans Commission Fund for Veterans' Assistance (FVA), contributed over $166 million towards veteran programs. Through this program, Texan veterans gain financial assistance, employment opportunities, continuing education, general and mental health grants, housing assistance, and more. With 1.7 million veterans in Texas, these programs provide crucial financial assistance, transportation services, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder counseling, and housing assistance.

Two of the many veteran assistance programs that the Texas Lottery funds are:

Santa Maria Hostel VIEWS Program. Texas has the largest population of female veterans in America. VIEWS provides Texas’s homeless female veterans with transitional housing to help them achieve stability in their life after the traumas of serving our country in the military. The program helps struggling female veterans recover and re-enter civilian life through education and employment; permanent housing; and mental, behavioral, and physical health services.

Honor Veterans Now. This program concentrates on providing wholesome and nutritious meals to young veterans under 60 who aren’t yet eligible for veteran food programs and who are struggling financially. Coming home from the military to a world where they have no skills to survive leaves many young veterans vulnerable to joblessness, poverty, physical limitations, lack of education, and lack of work experience. With 25% of young veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan reporting food insecurity and service-connected disabilities, Honor Veterans Now strives to give our nation’s brave young men and women the sustenance they need to move forward with their lives.

Click for more information about how the Texas Lottery supports education and veterans services.

When you buy an official Texas Lottery ticket at theLotter Texas, you can feel proud knowing that you are contributing towards state programs that benefit our children’s education and school facilities and assist the veterans who proudly served our nation in the military.