 I want to state the obvious, but it's been quite a year. Yeah, it was scary, right? I was scared. I didn't know if we were at the beginning of the movie Contagion or not. So personally, at the beginning of the pandemic felt like a train hit our household because I have two young sons. My husband and my two young boys were also working from home. All of us at home having to change the internet plan because the bandwidth was not enough. What if there's an extended lockdown? Do I have the resources I need? Does my family have it? Does my community have it? Day by day, it got easier, but I vividly remember that first month just feeling like the floor kind of went under me and I wasn't sure how we were going to manage it. I learned to cook. I hated cooking before the pandemic and now I love to cook because it's like a way for me to relieve stress. The need for strong civil society organizations at the local level was more critical than ever. And the lockdown again in this part of the world means 70% of the population that relies on daily wages in terms of them going to work and these were real life issues. In some instances, life and death. It happened almost overnight. It was literally like one week we were in the office and the next week we were locked in our houses. At the early stage, I think a lot of the Japanese MPOs or NGOs were in shock. And we've all had to change the way that we work. We had to shut down the office on Friday and an on-profit called us on Monday and said, I have everything at the office. The server, the files, the emails because they were not in the cloud. Everything was at the office. Probably they were saying, yes, we'll leave the technology investments for later. Is that the pandemic came? We started with the most basics. Food. Food and security became a big issue. People are frustrated with COVID coming. It depends the poverty that was already there. COVID-19 and the subsequent damage it has heaped on us as a society and as a nation may take a few years to heal, particularly those who live on the margins. Once we had the basics covered, now we also went into supporting organizations who didn't have the technology tools making sure that they have things like airtime just to make calls, laptops because again, most of them had desktops. Because of the lockdown, they were not able to access their offices. We just had to learn in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic how to adapt to the situation. How can we keep a community running or keep a community alive when all we have is this? Our team felt overwhelmed because it's like you have to go, you have to work from home. Your lifestyle is changing and at the same time, your workload is increasing a lot. The demand for the program skyrocketed. It was like the nonprofits that we serve realized during one weekend that they needed to move to the cloud, that their technology investments were not enough before the pandemic. The ability to problem solve collaboratively was really important during the pandemic. Every decision about like a whole new ball game. And what we saw across the network happening is people just turned on everything they had for the community. You could see partners starting to engage and takes up Italy, provided the space and was able to advocate for us to get funding from one of the big funders there. Sometimes what organizations just needed to know is that they weren't in it alone. We realize that today talking about digital doesn't just mean getting a new tool or starting to do something that wasn't done before, but it really means continuing to play a fundamental role for the group. One of the things that's been really wonderful about the last year is seeing our corporate partners and our foundation supporters step up and really contribute to our TechSoup COVID Recovery Fund. The COVID Relief Fund came out of a few conversations and then within like two months we had two and a half million dollars. People were just asking, how do we help? How do we help? They came to TechSoup to say, how do we respond across the network? And we did. We've been able to use that money to get needed technology into the hands of hundreds of NGOs in 17 different countries and in collaboration with seven of our partners to this really important cause. And so that's been really inspiring to see. We never thought of ourselves as a frontline organization when disaster strikes. And this was a unique situation of which infrastructure was actually the frontline of response. Having people with different perspectives be able to dialogue together was I think an important source of support to provide the community and that the community also provided us as people working directly with them. We're trusting the intelligence and community and strength and resilience of people on the ground. And when they say they need resources, I'm not judging them because their ask wasn't like ours. And we got to spend and focus time with organizations who were doing things on the ground to really make a difference. And personally, that was really validating to me and it felt like the best use of my time. Every time I was thinking, okay, I have two kids at home, how do I justify making sure that I'm spending my time more most effectively? It felt like an easy decision. I knew that what I was doing was helping build a better place for all of us and for my children especially. Some people talk about organizations thriving. They're serving more people than they ever have before. They're doing more of this than they ever have before. This is because more people are hungry than have been before. And more people are sick than have been before. And there are all these students that aren't going to school, they're not thriving. They're doing what nonprofits do, which is they're showing up for their communities in all the ways that they know how. Can we pull through that and say, hey, here's some things that we learned that we want to be able to do so that we're more prepared next time?