My giving story - a partnership during the pandemic

When the effects of the pandemic began to take its toll during the spring of 2020, I started searching for an opportunity to help those particularly hit hard in my hometown of Leesburg, Virginia.?It didn’t take long to find one that I could throw myself into. A conversation that began after a church service about helping the most vulnerable in our community, quickly resulted in a partnership with Loudoun Hunger Relief and a local farm, Sage Hill.

Loudoun Hunger Relief (LHR) is an organization that provides emergency food assistance to residents of Loudoun County.?This includes providing food to children on weekends during the school year and throughout the pandemic. This past year, LHR served more than 13,000 individuals directly and another 600-800 families each week through distribution partners with a total of about 355,000 service instances. Seventy percent of the families LHR served in 2020 had never needed assistance of any kind before.

Sage Hill Farm provided our group of 5 volunteers with a plot of land to grow food that was then donated to LHR for distribution.?The food is grown by our volunteers from seed and is free of pesticides.?As an avid gardener, it provided me with an opportunity to leverage a passion towards helping to provide a bit of relief to my community.?In addition to growing over 2,000 pounds of food, Microsoft’s generous volunteer matching program resulted in over $6,000 that was donated towards sustaining Loudoun Hunger Relief’s mission.?