Summer Break

10x our April donations & pausing on a high note

Good morning bread friends.

Today’s newsletter has a couple of pieces of big news that I’m excited to share and that I think you’re going to want to read.

10x April’s Donations

This is the biggest fundraising news I’ve ever shared with you all before! As you know, Bread & Justice is a philanthropic enterprise. Each month, we select a different social justice nonprofit to donate 100% of our profits towards. For every loaf of bread that we baked in April, combined with the donations you all made directly to Bread & Justice, we donated $347 to The Nehemiah Center For Urban Leadership’s Reentry Services.

You may recall that we also partnered with Pasture & Plenty last month to do a virtual pizza-making class that was open to the public. We called this event #PizzaWithPurpose, and it too was a fundraiser for Nehemiah. In fact, I got the idea to donate to Nehemiah from Pasture & Plenty. Prior to the public pizza class, we worked together to do a private #PizzaWithPurpose event for Exact Sciences, which was also a fundraiser for Nehemiah. Anyway, after these successful pizza classes, Pasture & Plenty is donating $3,000 to The Nehemiah Center For Urban Leadership’s Reentry Services. That is such an amazing sum of money for a small food business to contribute generously to the community. I’m sincerely amazed by how Christy McKenzie is able to run her business to give back like this.

Tallying that $3,000 with the generous $347 matching donations from both the Foxwells and from Adam & Britt Ryan, I’m pleased to share that our community contributed a total of $4,041 to The Nehemiah Center For Urban Leadership’s Reentry Services. What an amazing gift to our neighbors as they work to re-enter society successfully. All from a little bread and a little pizza. I’m so thankful to be a part of this community!

Taking a Break for the Summer

The second big piece of news for today is that Bread & Justice is going to be taking a break this summer. I’ve thought about this for a long time and decided that a hiatus is what I need in order to make plans for the possible future of this bakery & this newsletter. After this week, I’ll be taking a break from selling bread & writing for all of June and July. I’ll be using this time to experiment with different recipes and continue to build my skills as a baker. Also, I’ll be reflecting on ways to lean into this newsletter in the fall. Weekly writing has been a wonderful new discipline for me. I look forward to continuing it after the summer, and I’m curious about what my brain might seek to write without a weekly deadline. There is some chance that I’ll pop back into your inbox during the summer, but I’m giving myself permission to pause for these two months.

With Hannah finishing kindergarten soon, this is our family’s first summer break. So I’m really looking forward to slowing down a little bit to find our family’s rhythm during this season.

I hope many of you will stick around and choose to be a part of the next season of Bread & Justice. Thank you all for being such an amazing source of community and support up until now.

Cheers,
Mo
baker & writer

P.S. Bread is available for pre-order. As I said above, this is the last order for a while 😎

P.P.S. Welcome to the several dozen of you who are new to this newsletter. I’m so grateful to my friend Amy Halloran for sharing my letter from last week with her substack community. If you are new here and you have made it all the way this far - please drop me a reply to say Hi. I’d love to meet you. Also, here are a couple of past letters that I’d encourage you to check out to get an explanation of what Bread & Justice is all about & also to get history of our giving. 🤗