As a member of the Virginia Volunteerism Network, the Virginia Lottery’s mission is to contribute to Virginia’s future one play at a time. The Lottery responsibly creates and regulates games, experiences, and fun to benefit K-12 public education and Virginia initiatives. “Our commitment to the community and our beneficiaries extends past the profit that we return to K-12 education,” says Khalid Jones, Virginia Lottery Executive Director. “We make sure that we are present, in person, and engaged in the spirit of volunteerism. For me, this commitment is deeply personal and highly important.”

The Virginia Lottery has taken an active and positive role in the community by providing opportunities for employees to give back. The Commonwealth of Virginia provides 16 hours of community service leave to all full-time employees. In addition to those hours, the Virginia Lottery has committed to offering an additional 24 hours for full-time employees to serve in the community as a representative of the Lottery. These opportunities have included volunteering at food distributions, beautifications, home builds, partnering with schools and community organizations, and providing volunteers for animal shelters to name a few. These hours are available for employees to use during their scheduled workday to substitute for their time away from work.

For the first time, in 2024, Lottery Outreach curated several volunteer opportunities for April’s Global Volunteer Month. In the month of April, Lottery Outreach partnered with six non-profit organizations and five public schools, across seven of the eight sales regions of the state. Through the volunteerism efforts of 106 Lottery employees, more than 480 hours were recorded for April 2024.

Though a majority of the Lottery workforce is headquartered in downtown Richmond, they have seven other offices across the Commonwealth, and teams of employees working in field sales as well as one of Virginia’s three casinos. Those employees work in a range of roles including servicing players, visiting/servicing 5,300 retail partners, or covering the 24/7 operation required at a casino facility. Carving out time away from the office for volunteer service is challenging due to the type of in-person work these roles require. The Virginia Lottery has identified several remote opportunities that have allowed employees to volunteer in whether it be cutting, tying and delivering blankets for cancer patients, assembling word mats for elementary school students to aid in reading, or creating snuffle mats for an organization that provides support for sheltered animals. They continue to focus on identifying opportunities for all employees no matter their role or location.

Since the Virginia Lottery launched the Lottery Outreach program in July 2023, 210 unique employees (51%) have recorded over 1,000 outreach hours. In eight different regions of the state, Lottery employees work closely with each other, customers, partners, and other stakeholders. Proud to offer opportunities for all employees to participate in physical and remote volunteer opportunities, Lottery Outreach has partnered with 16 organizations allowing employees to give back in the communities where they live and work.

By law, 100% of Virginia Lottery profits support K-12 public education in Virginia. Every school district in the Commonwealth receives funding from the Lottery Proceeds Fund to support programs such as career and technical education, early reading intervention, and school breakfast. In Fiscal Year 2024, the Lottery generated more than $934 million for public education.

To learn more about the programs that are supported by lottery proceeds, click here. For a complete list of funding for each school division click here.