Spreading smiles

A story about our donation for July & announcing our partner for August

Good morning bread friends!

I have a fun short story to share with you. Yesterday, I had the honor of getting to call our nonprofit partner for the month of July, Family Health La Clinica, to tell them about your generosity. Typically when we select the nonprofit to donate to for any given month - the partner doesn’t know about it ahead of time. And commonly, they only find out at the end of the month when a donation arrives with a little note. In this case, I knew that Family Health La Clinica had instructions on their website that in order to donate to them - they asked that you call their Director of Strategic Community Engagement, Lisa Kilawee.

So yesterday, in between meetings for work I picked up the phone to call Lisa. As you might imagine, I have to start by introducing myself… then I introduce you all… and I introduce the concept behind this Bread & Justice bakery… and our mission to donate to social justice organizations. It was super fun! I got to explain that there are several hundred people on this email list that are trying to learn a bit more about the communities that they serve, and also there are a few dozen people that bought bread and/or donated to Bread & Justice so that we could give 100% of our profits to them this month.

Do you know that thing where you can hear another human being smiling through the phone? Indeed… I can assure you that your generosity put a huge smile on Lisa’s face. It was so neat to get to witness her joy as she reciprocated the introduction by sharing her passion for the work that they are doing and the lives that they are impacting.

As the only mobile migrant health clinic in Wisconsin, I learned that their COVID-19 Risk Mitigation Teams provided COVID testing and education to over 3,000 Migrant & Seasonal Agricultural Workers this year with their teams visiting sites in 23 counties across Wisconsin.

Yesterday’s conversation was yet another reminder to me that humans are incredible. It really is remarkable how much you can brighten someone’s day by just taking an interest in something that they care about. And especially when we band together like this in a community, there seems to be no limit to how much good we can put into the world.

Donating profits from July

So, that brings us to our donation for the month. As you already know by now, this community came together to in July to support Migrant and Seasonal Ag Workers by donating 100% of our profits to Family Health La Clinica. After all of the bread that you purchased, and all of the generous donations that were made directly to Bread & Justice on our website, we are able to donate a total of $401 this month to this important community health clinic and all of the vulnerable populations that they serve across central & northern Wisconsin.

For anyone who would like to provide additional contribution to Family Health La Clinica, or match our donation - please reply to this email and I’ll personally share the details of how you can easily do that.

Investing in the future for August

For the month of August, I’m excited to be donating 100% of our bakery’s profits to the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County to support their development of a skilled trade workforce center.

For those of you in Madison, you may have seen some reporting on the effort to build this center in the local news.

The new McKenzie Regional Workforce Center will be located in the former Thermo Fisher Scientific building in Fitchburg, WI. The highlight of the Center is a skilled trades curriculum, focused on providing young adults careers in skilled trades like plumbing and construction. I can personally attest that access to stable and good-paying jobs like this can create generational change within families. I’m excited to see that the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County is building upon its success in helping diverse school-age students to prepare for the world and is now actively working to develop their career skills in this way.

Thank you all for being together in this quest to make our society a little more just and a little more beautiful.

Cheers,
Mo

P.S. Sourdough bread is available to pre-order on the website. As a reminder, the more bread that you buy for yourself and your friends, the more that we can donate each month. Please take a moment to share this newsletter with others who you know would care about both good bread and real justice 😎