Give it, gather it, or go and do it.
Most foundations do the first. We were built out of a community that wanted to do all three, and that is still how the work happens.
We fund
Usually a local organization tells us what it needs. We check that it is a real organization doing real work, we send the money, and we ask them to confirm in writing what it paid for. That confirmation is a condition of the grant, not a favor.
Sometimes there is no organization to fund — a school needs the work done and we pay for the work directly. That is a different thing and we say so when it happens.
The money is raised by the people around us — distributors, employees in each of our markets, and their friends and families. When something happens somewhere we have a presence, we can raise in that market and move quickly, because the people who care about it are already there.
We gather
Money is not always the thing that is needed. We run supply drives for what a partner has actually asked for — classroom and school supplies, food, garden and building materials, wish-list gifts — and we get them to the place that asked.
We show up
Our done-in-a-day projects put volunteers on site for a day of work: a classroom painted, a wall built, a garden planted, a kitchen served, a home cleaned out after a flood. It is not a substitute for funding the people who work there year-round, and we do not pretend otherwise. It is how a community stays connected to what it pays for.
What we ask of a partner
A named organization with a verifiable existence.
A specific thing the money, goods or labor will go to.
A signed statement afterwards confirming how it was used.
Nothing that benefits any individual we have a relationship with.
What we do not do
Decide from a distance what a community needs.
Take credit for a partner's work.
Treat a day of volunteering as though it were the whole job.
Publish a number we cannot trace to a document.
What we cannot tell you
We do not publish a lifetime total of money raised or people helped. A number like that is easy to produce and hard to stand behind, so we would rather give you the projects and the documents underneath them. The Foundation's work begins in 2023, and every project figure on this site traces to a filed return, a partner's own written report, or a bank record. Where a figure is not yet settled, we say so.