Voting Rights

Announcing donations to Madym and preparing to uphold American democracy

Good morning and happy #Gratituesday :)

This morning I’m feeling exceedingly grateful for the warm weather. Yesterday, after lunch I reflected on my calendar full of meetings and opted out of sitting in my basement on yet another video conference call. Instead I participated in my meetings by phone while walking through my neighborhood. It was a delightful change of pace. As an unexpected bonus, I think I engaged in the meeting more fully and retained more information from the meeting than usual. I think I’d attribute my engagement to not being distracted by other browser tabs, and the general novelty of a change of pace. So for those of you who may find yourself doing video calls frequently throughout the day, let me recommend you consider going for a walk for one of your meetings on a sunny day and see how you like it.

Anyway… it’s our first bread day of a new month. Let’s talk about the awesome donations that we were able to make together for March, and what we’re going to do in April.

Let’s donate our profits for March

Much to my delight, there continues to be new people joining this community each month… so let me tell you what we’re up to here. Bread & Justice is a philanthropic enterprise. As such, all profits from the sale of bread are donated to organizations working towards a more just society. For the month of March, this community came together in recognition of Women’s History Month to support Maydm, Inc. 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 $804 this month to Madym.

I saw that Madym started a fundraising campaign for Women’s History Month and I donated directly to that campaign. I know some of you would like to support them directly also, so I’m sharing that link here. Next week I’ll update you all on the matching donations and additional gifts shared by this community.

For April, let’s try to protect American democracy

There has been much news lately about corporations speaking out in Georgia against the state’s recently passed voting law. If you don’t know too much about that yet, here are a few links: (corporations speaking out, what the law really does, the legislation)

What you might not know is that Georgia is just one of many states that have already began to propose legislation to limit voting access in the past few months.

In a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, and under the pretense of responding to (baseless and racist) allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, state lawmakers across the country have introduced over 300 bills with restrictive voting provisions in 47 states as of March. (source)

This is a colossal problem that there is an active movement to roll back access to voting in our democracy. It is particularly challenging to address in a two-party system when elected officials in one party are working to increase voter participation and elected officials in the other party are working to decrease voter participation.

It would seem that ground zero for this fight right now is in Georgia. The NAACP along with several other voting rights groups have filed a joint lawsuit against Georgia for its intent to disenfranchise its ethnic minority voters. And for the month of April, I am proud to support the NAACP in their fight to protect voting rights both in Georgia and across this country.

Founded in 1909 in response to the ongoing violence against Black people in America, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is the largest and most pre-eminent civil rights organization in the nation. Their mission is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all persons.

I’ll go into more about the importance of voting rights and the harm that these bills are doing next week. For now, I thank you for being a part of this effort to build a more just and less racist society. And thanks for supporting my bread in the process :)

Cheers,

Mo
Baker