We went back to the table.
## Andrew’s Firm and the Grant
I want to tell this part briefly because it is not the heart of the story, but it is part of the picture.
Andrew followed through on the community investment idea he had mentioned in our first real conversation. He connected the Hartfield Community Kitchen Initiative with his firm’s charitable giving committee. The grant application took three months and involved more paperwork than I want to describe in detail, and in February we received a notification that the program had been awarded a twelve-thousand-dollar grant for the following year’s operations.
This was significant. It was not life-changing for the program — we have several funding streams — but it was enough to expand the delivery radius we had been unable to extend because of transportation costs, and it was enough to hire a part-time coordinator position that I had been doing on volunteer time that I did not really have.
I thanked Andrew in a way that I tried to make proportional to what he had done, which was: he had made a connection between his work and my work and followed through on it. That is not a small thing but it is not an enormous thing either. It is the kind of thing that people do when they want someone to be part of their life in a real way rather than just an acknowledged way.
Paige called me the day I got the grant notification. She said Andrew had told her.