Daily Double: Double Your Donation to Provide COVID-19 Aid to Refugees
by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director
A little more than a year ago, a representative of a wonderful foundation contacted us with a proposal. It’s always amazing to hear from this individual, proposal or not. She and I had met about a year before in Greece while she was visiting various projects in the Thessaloniki area. She is fiercely intelligent and curious, an ideal personification of the foundation she represents.
In Jordan, our Gather for Goats project provides Syrian refugee families with the life-enhancing gift of milk goats.
Anyway, this representative told me that she was in Jordan with her family and some time opened up where she could visit our Gather for Goats project. Let me tell you what—there are many things to do in Jordan on a day off, so the fact that she used it to visit a refugee site is another testament to her greatness. A meeting with our partner org in Mafraq was arranged and they took her to visit several recipient families.
After her visit, the foundation offered LHI a match grant to raise funds for the project (one stipulation of their match grants is that the foundation remain anonymous). A match grant is a conditional award granted only if we raise a certain amount of money through our own efforts. For every dollar you donate, the foundation matches it. Through this partnership and your generous support, we raised a total of $270,000, significantly expanding the goat program to hundreds of other Syrian refugee families.
As part of our “We Keep Going” campaign, the same foundation has offered yet another generous match grant for our current efforts to supply refugees with face masks, sanitizer, food, and other essentials to help those dealing with the consequences of COVID-19 while living in crowded refugee camps.
Through August, every dollar you donate will be matched! It doubles your donation, which doubles the amount of critical aid refugees will receive. Our goal is to raise $60,000, which when matched will become $120,000! This will enable us to provide COVID-19 aid to refugees for the rest of 2020. This is exactly the good news we need right now!