Last week, Mackenzie Scott, the billionaire ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced she's giving away $640 million to more than 350 organizations across the country.

Only one group in Kentucky was chosen Voices of Hope, whose mission it is to increase access to recovery programs and decrease overdose deaths in Kentucky.

We help people in recovery stay in recovery from a variety of substance use disorders.

We have our recovery community center here in Lexington on North Broadway, where people can walk in and receive direct services, recovery coaching.

Goal setting.

We have recovery coaches that are highly trained, placed in over 20 different counties throughout the state.

So that can be like county jails, syringe service programs, hospital settings, opioid treatment programs.

Everyone that works here is in recovery themselves.

So it even holds a special place because we've been there and been through what our participants had to.

Voices of Hope.

Applied for a an award.

Actually, it's not even a grant.

It's an award with the yield giving open call.

So it was a national call for submissions and we were amongst the top scoring organizations of 6300 organizations.

So we applied for a $1 million award and we were actually awarded $2 million because our our submission scored so high.

It was a little surreal.

A few of our grant writing team that worked on the submission, we were pretty like emotional and and excited.

So many possibility that you can accomplish with a with a free $2 million that can support our organization.

And we really believe in the work we're doing.

It's really going to bring it bring up the morale of the recovery coaches that work here.

They know that the organization has the means to support them even further.

And it may even be able to let us expand services so we're more visible in the community.

We really take pride in like having highly trained staff that provide the best recovery services in Kentucky.

So we don't think they can get much better, but but they might even get better with, you know, having more available funding.

One one major goal that we've identified that we really want to accomplish is to expand our fund raising programs.

So obviously, being a nonprofit and being, you know, locally ran, we need more funding to be able to to maximize our delivery of services.

So the better fundraising efforts we have and we can bolster that with this award, the better.

I'm just really grateful to yield giving lever for change and Mackenzie Scott for the opportunity.

We really think that this is going to strengthen our organization even more than it already is.

So just, just really appreciative and.

Congrats to them.

Voices of Hope started in 2014 distributing Narcan and providing overdose response training.

It'll be celebrating its 10th anniversary later this year.