by Hayley Smith, LHI Founder and Director
History is made as my family and friends help load the first container of LHI humanitarian aid!
“But nonprofits don’t pay very well!” Those are my mom’s [concerned] words when I told her I was starting Lifting Hands International. And she wasn’t wrong. I reassured her that it would be a small project on the side because, well, I was just one person, and I majored in English and minored in Arabic. No shred of business training in my entire existence.
That mother/daughter exchange was around this time of year 7 years ago. I’d recently gotten back from a stint as a volunteer in Greece, and I was fired up about what I’d witnessed. My mind wouldn’t stop churning with flashbacks of refugees, soaking from being in the sea and shaking in the cold. I had to do something.
It is hard to believe that LHI’s first aid warehouse was my living room!
So, I filled out the required paperwork, paid the fees, and started a nonprofit. I had a year to find a board and write bylaws, so I put that off for a while. In the meantime, my goal? To fill one container of aid per year, and aid that refugees actually need, not what people assume they need. It wasn’t an ambitious business plan by any means, but one container of organized boxes of critical aid is certainly better than nothing.
Well, we filled that container in two months, and I thought that was the biggest project LHI would ever do! But LHI just kept growing and growing and growing into the international org it is today! Thank you to our volunteers, supporters, donors, staff, and teams for helping to build Lifting Hands International over the last 7 years.