Operation Liberty Hill (OLH) just wrapped up a busy holiday season serving more than 1,100 kids in their seasonal charitable programs. Let’s chat with OLH Program Director Regina O’Brien and learn how their partnership helps the Liberty Hill community and Liberty Hill ISD (LHISD) students.

During the 2025 holiday season, OLH coordinated the Giving Tree and Blurple Santa charitable programs that provide toys and gift cards for local families. The Giving Tree allowed for 616 kids in the community to be sponsored and have Christmas gifts under the tree. “The community stepped up big time! Even though we had a record number of kids in the Giving Tree, every single child was adopted,” said O’Brien. 

LHISD families gave new and unwrapped toys to the Blurple Santa program coordinated by the City of Liberty Hill police, LHISD police, and Operation Liberty Hill in record numbers. Families that are part of the OLH food pantry were able to pick out new and unwrapped toys for their children. Even with toys needed for over 550 kids, there were more toys than kids! The extra toys were given to the Sandy Creek neighborhood that was affected by the floods last July.

According to O’Brien, “Our community is extraordinary and has such a generous heart. We appreciate them.”

While these additional holiday programs were going on, OLH was still meeting the needs of our community through their food pantry and blessing bags. In 2024, the OLH food pantry distributed more than 550,000 pounds of food! The food pantry stays stocked, thanks to the generosity of local families, HEB grocery stores and local Sprouts chains. Volunteers help pass out food twice a week to qualified families.

Blessing bags are an extension of the original summer snack bags program that began 14 years ago. Today, the program is able to give at-risk LHISD students food for the weekend and over holiday breaks. Seventeen percent of LHISD students are at risk and qualify for blessing bags. “The Lord just started pressing on my co-worker Susan to make this a year-round program, so we started looking at what that might look like,” O’Brien recalls. “I started reaching out to counselors and then the government shutdown happened, and SNAP benefits went away. And we were already ready to help families. It was amazing.” 

LHISD Homeless Liaison Jamie Richardson is grateful for the partnership with Operation Liberty Hill as the district has seen an increase in students experiencing food insecurity. She said, “The blessing bags provided by Operation Liberty Hill—filled with non-perishable snacks—have helped meet the immediate needs of students across our schools ensuring that students have access to food when they need it most.”

As Liberty Hill grows and cost of living continues to increase, the need for OLH will continue to grow. They are preparing for that growth with a capital campaign to build a new 22,000 square foot facility off Hwy.1869 near downtown Liberty Hill on acreage that was recently donated. O’Brien is grateful for the new location near downtown. She said, “There's a lot of poverty still within the city limits, and so to be right there is brilliant.” 

They are actively accepting donations of gently used clothes and toys and food for the pantry. Additionally, anyone 16 years old and over is welcome to volunteer to pack blessing bags and sort donations on Fridays when school is out. You can learn more about donating time or resources on their website.

There is an old African proverb that says “it takes a village to raise a child.” In Liberty Hill, we are grateful that our village includes partners like Operation Liberty Hill! If you’d like to learn more about OLH, visit their website here: https://www.operationlh.org/.