A caregiver in full PPE holds a baby at an orphanage in Wuhan, China, one of many where you helped deliver emergency medical and cleaning supplies to protect children in care when the novel coronavirus first broke out at the beginning of 2020. 
Hannah (front) and her siblings went four days without food before you helped make it possible to deliver emergency food baskets to over 1,800 families unable to work or purchase food during India’s nationwide lockdown in March 2020. 
Four-year-old Gracie was weeks away from traveling to her adoptive family in the U.S. when COVID-19 hit Haiti. With a heart condition and suppressed immune system, she urgently needed to be on the last known flight leaving Haiti. With your support, Gracie made it safely to the U.S. to join her family in early April 2020. 
Early in the pandemic, you provided 250 families in Thailand with care packages full of rice, cooking oil, fish oil, instant noodles, canned foods, baby formula, detergent, soap, toothpaste, disinfectant, cloth masks and more. 
Before the pandemic, Ms. Yan sold beverages at a local school to support her children. But when schools abruptly closed in Cambodia, she lost her source of income. Immediately, you helped provide emergency food as well as remote social work support to help her develop an alternate business plan to provide for her kids. 
For the children at this orphanage in Vietnam, you helped provide hand sanitizers, soap, thermometers, face masks and vitamin supplements to build up children’s immune systems. You also helped our orphanage partners pay overtime wages to staff and caregivers who had to work longer hours to care for children and keep them safe. 
During normal times, Miremba (right) and her cousin attend a Holt-supported early childhood education center in Uganda. But learning at home without electricity was difficult during the pandemic — until you helped provide solar lamps for all the kids in the program! 
A doctor checks the temperature of a baby at the Mother and Child Health Center in Shinshicho, Ethiopia, where you not only provided masks and sanitizers directly to children and families, but also provided critically needed PPE to this hospital — protecting both medical staff and the women and children who receive care here. 
South Korea was among the first countries hit by COVID-19 before it became a global pandemic. When it hit, you helped mobilize an emergency shipment of masks and sanitizers for children in orphanages and foster homes — keeping them healthy and safe. 
In Colombia, you helped our partner orphanage hire additional caregivers as well as purchase masks, gloves, cleaning supplies, biohazard bags and disposable gowns for caregivers to protect the children from the virus. “Our efforts could not be possible without the generosity of our donors, families and friends… GOD BLESS YOU,” they wrote in a thank you message. 
In Mongolia, the three domestic violence shelters you help support have seen significant, double-digit increases in reports of abuse since the beginning of the pandemic. For women and children fleeing violence, you provide everything from a warm, safe bed and nourishing food to counseling and life skills training. Since the pandemic, you have also helped provide additional infant formula, vitamins, medical equipment and other essentials. 
For kids who attend the Holt-supported Red Stone School near the garbage dump in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the free lunch they eat at school is often the only one they eat all day. When schools closed, you helped deliver emergency food to these children and their families — as well as masks and sanitizers to help keep them safe from COVID. 
And in the U.S., you made it possible for Holt’s foster care and adoption team to virtually “babysit” for fostering families, help children celebrate their birthdays, launch an online family support group and train new foster families in anticipation of an influx of children.
As 2020 comes to a close, and we look back on this extraordinary year, so many emotions come to the surface. And so many moments stand out.
The year 2020 will of course be remembered for the global pandemic that caused a tragic loss of life in countries around the world — an event never before seen in most of our lifetimes. It will be remembered for the days that turned to weeks that turned to months spent in quarantine and isolation from our friends, colleagues, classmates and loved ones. In the U.S., it will be remembered for the Black Lives Matter movement and months-long protests in the streets, a polarizing election and raging wildfires that burned in the West.
Everywhere, 2020 will be remembered for the personal tragedies that far too many of us experienced as a result of the massive global tragedy called COVID.
Everywhere, it will be remembered for the personal tragedies that far too many of us experienced as a result of the massive global tragedy called COVID.
But for Holt, and for many other organizations devoted to doing good around the world, the year 2020 also showed how a shared crisis can unite and motivate and bring out the absolute best in all of us — the best in you. From the beginning, when Holt was among the first organizations called to help protect children endangered by the outbreak of a new virus in Wuhan, you overwhelmed both us and our partners in China with your response. In the months that followed, as the novel coronavirus outbreak became a global pandemic affecting children and families in every country where Holt works, you continued to give and give and give — even as the virus reached the U.S. and a global crisis became a local one.
You showed time and again that we truly were, and are, all in this together.
It feels like not enough to just say thank you for everything you did to help children and families in need this year. We want to show you the faces of the people you helped, and the lives you literally saved, through your generous and heartfelt and selfless giving throughout this unbelievable year.
2020 was an extraordinary and unprecedented year for many reasons, not least of which was the kindness, compassion and hope we witnessed from you. Amid all this loss, all this heartbreak, you never forgot those most vulnerable — the children and families we serve together with you. And that is something we, too, will never forget as we look back on the year 2020.
We are humbled by you.
