  The DECam Local Volume Exploration survey (DELVE) is a 126-night survey
program on the 4-m Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory in Chile. DELVE seeks to understand the characteristics of faint
satellite galaxies and other resolved stellar substructures over a range of
environments in the Local Volume. DELVE will combine new DECam observations
with archival DECam data to cover ~15000 deg$^2$ of high-Galactic-latitude (|b|
> 10 deg) southern sky to a 5$\sigma$ depth of g,r,i,z ~ 23.5 mag. In addition,
DELVE will cover a region of ~2200 deg$^2$ around the Magellanic Clouds to a
depth of g,r,i ~ 24.5 mag and an area of ~135 deg$^2$ around four Magellanic
analogs to a depth of g,i ~ 25.5 mag. Here, we present an overview of the DELVE
program and progress to date. We also summarize the first DELVE public data
release (DELVE DR1), which provides point-source and automatic aperture
photometry for ~520 million astronomical sources covering ~5000 deg$^2$ of the
southern sky to a 5$\sigma$ point-source depth of g=24.3, r=23.9, i=23.3, and
z=22.8 mag. DELVE DR1 is publicly available via the NOIRLab Astro Data Lab
science platform.
