We recently connected with Sabrina Johannes and have shared our conversation below.

Sabrina , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I am so excited to continue to be able to share our mission and be able to spread the word about our company. I am the founder for the national non-profit Deployed Love. We have been around for over 5 years now and have managed to serve hundreds of families from one side of the United States to the other.

Becoming a non-profit is a very hard project to take on, especially if you are starting from square one. I had no clue where to even begin. However, I knew that the mission we would accomplish was going to be worth all of the learning and trial and error to get there.

Deployed Love’s Mission is to create a safe space to allow for connection for military families. We support military families before, during, and after deployments. As a military family we are well versed in the ins and outs of what those difficult separations can look and feel like. We are a fully volunteer ran organization with nearly all of our volunteers being military families members as well. So we are able to provide beautiful support to military families coming from a place of totally understanding.

We have a few really great programs that we are able to run annually across a handful of bases. (But we are always looking to expand to more bases as we continue to raise funds) Our main program is our Holiday Mini Sessions, we have ran this program since the very beginning. Every year we recruit some of the most talented professional photographers from across the country who are willing to volunteer just 1 day of their time to give back to families in the military who are going to have to spend the Holiday Season separated from their service member. Each family that participates gets a handful of professional pictures that they can use to make Christmas Cards and send love down range. We have met some of the most beautiful families! I personally cry at every one of these events I attend to volunteer at. You just can’t help it when you are able to spread some joy when people are just feeling lost and lonely.

We also provide support through our podcast Ruck Up Buttercup. I personally am one of the 2 co-hosts of the show. We are using our knowledge, and experience, as well as those amazing guests we have on the show, to provides amazing content to the military community. We highlight all kinds of organizations, authors, and business owners who have a product or service that relates to the military community. We have met some outstanding individuals who have dedicated their lives to simply making the very difficult lives of military families just a little easier. We hare on our 4th year of our podcast and it has also been a learning experience. But I love just how well it fits into our mission of connection.

Our volunteers at local bases across the country are the cherry on top. We are proud to know that as we continue to grow our mission will spread further and stronger. The local volunteers hosts monthly events allowing the community to come together throughout the year. They are a safe space for military families to meet up and connect.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am Sabrina Johannes I am the founder for Deployed Love. I am a veteran spouse, and married my husband when we were only 20. He was active duty at the time and we have been on some outstanding adventures from living in Hawaii, having babies in Germany, and then shifting gears and working on the civilian side but still for the military. We have also gone through 5 deployments together. They just never get easier, and knowing that he has missed many holidays, and birthdays is always hard for both him and our family. But I am so grateful for the journey we have been on.

As a professional photographer I loved the business I had created and established, but the routine of doing pictures with no why was starting to drag at me. When the idea to do some free each year around the holidays for the military families around me came about. After the first year of just doing them I soon realized after talking to the families, and volunteers that more than just a photo session each year was really needed. We also knew that if we were able to be a non-profit we would have a lot more flexibility in order to provide even better events in the future.

So I took to learning everything I could. I knew I wanted to provide something that hadn’t existed during my deployments that would have been so helpful. The military provides some support but their main focus is really on the mission, and we wanted to have something that was the same across the board no matter where you move, you can know that you can reach out to Deployed Love for support.

As the founder I am most proud of the team that has grown from this organization. Since we are all military affiliated, it has been so beautiful to see it not only support the families that attend our events, but also the volunteers. They have grown to be great friends, learned from each other, and continued to grow the mission. We are all experienced in the military life and coming from all over the country it’s beautiful the amount of team work that goes into everything we do. About a year ago we got stationed over seas again and so I had to give most of the leadership of the non-profit over to a new Executive Director, and focus my energy with the podcast while we are here. And I am so proud of just how well the team has been able to adjust to new leadership and really keep the mission alive and growing!!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Oh I can definitely show our resilience. So Deployed Love started out mid 2019. We were supper excited, we grew a great group of volunteers and had expanded to 5 bases by the time our first “official” Holiday Minis were to happen. It was a mind blowing year with us being able to support nearly 200 families with just holiday photos alone. We were so excited to hopefully see that much growth each year as time went on.

But as we all know, just a few months later the world stopped. There was no going to train volunteers, there was no holding social events, there was no fundraising. It was all silent on the Homefront. I know we were all scared of where this was going to leave our little baby non-profit that hadn’t had the time to even get its feet under it.

But like a beautiful machine we all got to brainstorming and coming up with ways we can make it all happen. We were all experts with zoom by then as we already used it often. When you have volunteers from Hawaii to Dc you are big advocates for technology. So we pulled together and created 2 new programs. That is where Ruck Up Buttercup our podcast became a thing, as well as Deployed Love Academy (now has been removed in favor of in person events). But even with digital events we were able to create a community!!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We have done so many different things in the sake of marketing and reaching more families over the years. Since we are based around how we can support families before, during and after deployments, it has been most productive to us to go straight to the source. We have gone onto military bases and done a lot of outreach. We love to partner with other military associated organizations to support events they are already hosting. This allows us to volunteer, get our name out, but most often they are very willing to allow us to set up an informational booth. We have found at least with our mission and our services that families tend to respond and come to our events more if they have met us in person before!!

We like to meet them, interact with their kids, and let them know about upcoming events!! The biggest struggle with finding a safe space and a community for military families is not knowing anyone. We are always having to make big moves across the country, every 2-3 years. Which means starting all over. So we are happy to get out and meet people face to face as often as we can.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.deployedlove.org
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/deployedlove
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/deployedloveorg
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrina-johannes-129b10116/
• Other: Podcast: www.facebook.com/ruckupbuttercup www.instagram.com/ruckupbuttercuppodcast

Image Credits
Jillian Knowles Aim True Photography