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Instead of offering a product today on the Daily Guff we offer you an opportunity to give a Christmas to less fortunate children in Detroit. This year the Old Newsboys’ Goodfellow Fund of Detroit will distribute 36,000 holiday gift boxes – their community fundraising goal is $1.4 million. While looking for a charity for Guffly to support this holiday season, it just made sense to help them cover Christmas 2009 expenses and maybe even help towards their 2010 goal.
The Old Newsboys’ Goodfellow Fund of Detroit is a 95-year-old charity founded in 1914 by James J. Brady. The organization includes 300 members whose sole mission is to ensure that there is “No Kiddie without a Christmas.” Each holiday season the Detroit Goodfellows distribute holiday gift boxes to children ages four through 13 living in Detroit, Highland Park, River Rouge and Hamtramck. Each child receives warm clothing, toys, books, games and candy.
The Detroit Goodfellows are not affiliated with any other Goodfellow organization and there is no national headquarters. As a Detroit business, Guffly feels that it is important to us to support efforts to improve our city. You have all heard the bad stuff about Detroit and here is an opportunity to help one of the good things about Detroit. We see great things happening in Detroit every day and we hope that by bringing this incredibly worthy charity to the Daily Guff we can be a part of some of those things.
Learn more about how you can make a charity Christmas gift that will be match dollar for dollar by Guffly on the Daily Guff: http://guffly.com
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In honor of Thanksgiving and all of the upcoming holidays, Guffly would like to support the Capuchin Soup Kitchen of Detroit. The Capuchin Soup Kitchen is a human service organization that serves the poor who suffer from lack of basic human needs. These needs range from material needs like food, clothing and household accessories to psychological and social needs such as motivation and rehab or simply creating a support system. Every person who comes to the soup kitchen for assistance is welcomed, without regard to race, sex, age, color, national origin, religious preference, handicap or income.
We feel pretty darn lucky that we have families and friends to enjoy the holiday season with but our hearts go out to the people that don’t. That’s why Guffly is featuring an extra special Daily Guff! A donation of whatever amount you can afford and Guffly is going to match it dollar for dollar.
The good stuff we’re supporting includes these services provided by the Capuchin Soup Kitchen:
- 2,000 hot meals are frequently served each day at their two locations
- About 300,000 pounds of food distributed per month to families
- About 30,000 articles of clothing given to clients per month
- More than 500 pieces of furniture and appliances given to families each month
- Showers and a change of clothing for up to 30 homeless and poorly housed persons per day
- Jefferson House, a substance abuse treatment program servicing up to 12 indigent men
- A children’s library and art therapy studio serving up to 800 children per month
- A 25,000 square foot urban farm project
See – we’re even considering the environment with the choice of this awesome charity because they have a great urban farm project that’s bringing local food to the kitchen and providing an opportunity for many people!
Get in on the good and help Guffly Give on Thanksgiving Day (and until 11am the morning after) at http://guffly.com
Thanks to all our Guffly supporters that allowed us to donate $180 to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen!
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Last week was Fair Trade week at Guffly and to make a bigger impact on fair trade Guffly donated a microloan of $175 for Amevi Adokanu through Kiva. We achieved this total through support by our Twitter followers and Facebook fans!
We’re proud to support Amevi, a traveling shoe saleswomen in the neighborhood of Totsi in Lomé. She sells the shoes from house to house and is well known among the community. Amevi’s business allows her to assist her husband, a cook, to provide for their children’s needs.
We felt compelled to support Amevi because her stock is almost exhausted and she would like to purchase 25 boxes of various styles for women and 30 boxes of children’s shoes. We were excited to be able to raise some of the remaining funds to help this entrepreneur. As young entrepreneurs here at Guffly, we understand that it can be difficult to get things going and to keep them running and we’re fortunate enough to be working in Detroit, not a third world country.
Guffly Gives is part of our initiative to give what we can to people and charities throughout the world. We know that being eco-friendly is more than recycling our paper and cans – it also means being world friendly. That’s why last week was Fair Trade week to bring some our favorite fair trade suppliers that work with artisans across the world into the Daily Guff spotlight. We feel that by supporting fair trade we’re enabling people to become more aware of what the implications of non-fair trade are.
Stay tuned to what Guffly is up to and help us support our next Guffly Gives!
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As a bright eyed senior in college I thought I knew it all. My time at the University of Michigan had me thinking I knew a lot about how the world worked and what my opinions were on the whole operation. That was the case until I took a class that, now that I look back on it, challenged every decision I had made until that point. That class taught me all about fair trade, and sadly the reality of what occurs when there ISN’T fair trade. Simply put, I had a rude awakening.
During the course we learned about the history of trade, specifically between the US and Mexico. I won’t bore you with the academic details though. Instead, I’ll skip to the part when we actually went to border cities in Mexico and got a hands on feel of how trade effects real people. I stayed with a woman and her family. Her home was two rooms made from concrete, one bedroom for her, her husband, and her son, and another for pretty much everything else. There was no running water, no heat, and spotty electricity. Despite this, she was maybe one of the most kind women I have ever met. She took in visitors like myself because that is what she had to do to get by in addition to making corn tortillas and selling them to her local community.
Her husband once worked in a factory for a US company who’s name I won’t mention. Even as one of the better maquiladoras (factories) in the area, the work conditions left a lot to be desired. He was searching for other work, but the city he and his family lived in was completely dominated by factories who didn’t pay enough to support a family with. He had no choice but to leave his family, his home, and his city to look for other work. Like many others in his situation, he debated taking the life threatening risk of entering the US without documentation in order to make ends meet.
There’s no way I could explain the grim reality faced by this whole group of people. Beyond the direct impact that maquiladoras have on the workers and their families, there is also a slew of negatives that the poverty they sustain contributes to – like drug and alchohol abuse, abandoned and abused children, and health related problems (all of which I encountered pretty closely by visiting a drug rehab center, an orphanage, and a health clinic). After seeing all these things that hurt my heart (literally, it ached…) I felt pretty hopeless. I knew that my buying decisions encouraged this and it made me feel pretty gross.
That’s when I knew I had to (1) make fair trade a part of my life as a consumer because I knew I couldn’t stop buying stuff altogther. So, I decided to buy less so that I could afford to buy stuff that supports people getting paid and treated fairly. And (2), figure out a way to tie my beliefs about fair trade to whatever it was that I would end up doing with my life.
That turned out to be the first little seed of Guffly being planted in my head. I’m happy I saw what I did, when I did. Though ignorance was bliss, doing something to encourage fair trade feels way better.
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It’s Fair Trade Week at Guffly and we think there’s no better way to celebrate than by directly supporting an entrepreneur who needs our help. Using Kiva (which we totally heart), Guffly will donate a micro loan but it’s your job to determine how much we’ll give!
We need everyone and their mama to retweet this post because for everyone new person who FOLLOWS US ON TWITTER or JOINS OUR FACEBOOK FAN PAGE by Saturday, September 13, 2009 and we’ll donate $1. Yep, that’s right…if 500 join and follow, then we’ll donate $500.
So, who do we want to donate a micro loan to? Her name is Amevi Adokanu and she currently needs $475. She “lives in the neighborhood of Totsi in Lomé. She is a traveling saleswoman of shoes for women and little girls. This business allows her to financially assist her husband, a cook, provide for their children’s needs. She sells her wares house to house, which means that she is well-known in many homes. Right now her stock is almost exhausted; it is for this reason that she is requesting a loan from the micro-finance group WAGES, in order to purchase 25 boxes of various styles of shoes for women and 30 boxes of shoes for children.” (Kiva.org)
If we exceed the amount she needs then we’ll find a second entrepreneur to lend to! So come on…when has doing something so HUGE been so easy? Join Guffly’s Facebook Fan Page or follow us on Twitter by Septemeber 13, 2009 so that you can help us help out Amevi.
We live for this stuff.
xoxo,
The Guffly Crew
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We don't want any puppies to be sad...
Today we were thinking about that sad Sarah McLachlan commercial for the ASPCA and totally wanted to cry. To calm our pet-loving nerves we just have to do something about it. So… Guffly will donate $0.10 to the Michigan Humane Society (yes, that’s 10 cents…we’re new okay!) for every person who retweets the following message on Twitter:
Save the Pups! Guffly (http://guffly.com) will donate $0.10 per RT to the MI Humane Society!
Help care for the cute little doggies, kitties, and other animal friends that the Michigan Humane Society keeps safe and warm. Aww, schmoopies!
This Guffly Gives promotion will end in 24 hours.
