That’s the message Teddie Kossof, owner of the Northfield Teddie Kossof Salon and Spa and chairman of the new Youth Services of Glenview/Northbrook’s Business Leaders’ Children’s Fund has sent to area businesses.

Kossof gives haircuts to kids who need them for free, and figures other business people can provide such in-kind gifts as well.

Recently, he’s written local business leaders to ask their firms to sign up to be a “corporate player” for Youth Services, with donations that range from $300 to a $1,000 “MVP” donation.

The funds are being sought to “establish a fund that will provide children” who are Youth Services clients “ with those ‘extras’ we and our children take for granted.”

Cash gifts from business people can provide a host of possibilities: library cards for kids in unincorporated areas of Cook County who cannot afford the hundreds of dollars out-of-district-cards cost; cribs for infants whose parents can’t afford them; transportation to after-school activities for children whose only parent has to work in the afternoons.

A relatively new program of Glenview/Northbrook Youth Services is a relatively new boys’ club for youngsters from Glenview’s Sunset Mobile Home Park. “Some of them for sure” would benefit from a little financial help from local businesses, said the agency’s Executive Director Nancy Bloom. “A lot of these kids have very little, especially in comparison to the rest of the community they’re in.”

“Without giving, there’s no getting,” said Kossof. “I know that for sure.”