Since day 1, we’ve made it part of our mission to give. Give away useful content. Give away beer whenever we have a chance. Give money to causes that we believe in. And give our time and talent to serve. But what about when we’re too busy to make it to a volunteer event, or we’re the Day After Tomorrow weather stops for a little while, and there’s no disaster to respond to?
A New Approach to Giving
Look, the point of this article is not to beat our own drum. We just want you to know that the heart of Beer Chronicle is to give back. When you buy something from our online shop, we’re paying it forward from now on.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t say a big, big, huuuge, thank you to everybody that helped us make those donations happen.
But it hit us recently. What are we doing in-between these big headline-worthy disasters? Can we be doing more, or more specifically, could we be doing it more consistently?
“If actions speak louder than words, patterns should be a siren.” – Anthony Gorrity
We don’t just talk about it. We be about it. And we wanna be about it more consistently, so we’re partnering with a global initiative as well as a local one.
This also won’t take place of giving back during disasters. Maybe one day some of our most loyal readers and friends will have a whole set of “🖕 _____” glassware, but hopefully, we never have to make another one of those.
The Heart of Beer Chronicle starts in Houston
We’ve done a lot of research over the last few months, and nobody seems to make a dollar stretch further in Houston than the Houston Food Bank. $1 provides 3 meals for those in need.
The Houston Food Bank is America’s largest food bank in distribution leading hunger relief in 18 southeast Texas counties. Founded in 1982, they’re a certified member of Feeding America, the nation’s food bank network, with a four-star rating from Charity Navigator. The Houston Food Bank distributes fresh produce, meat, and nonperishables and prepares nutritious hot meals for kids in their state-of-the-art Keegan Kitchen.
Over 150 million meals were made possible by the Houston Food Bank. Nearly 100,000 households per week received food assistance.
Yes, there are starving kids in Africa. If your mom didn’t remind you of that when you refused your Lima Beans, then I don’t know even know what to say.
And that’s why we’re going to give to a global initiative as well, but it starts with home base. Period.
Giving Globally for a Broader Impact
Even more time and effort was chosen to make sure we picked the right place to donate. But sheesh. There are so many places and ways to do it!
Water? Food? Trees? Education? No matter how imperfect things are, it became clear that we’re super fortunate to live in America. There are so many places around the world where so many things can be improved, so we wanted to make sure every dollar stretched.
That’s why we chose to give to Eden Restoration Projects. $.78 of every dollar donated goes to planting trees around the world, but it’s deeper than that. The money goes to people around the world that live below the poverty line, and they plant the trees. This is a force multiplier.
Here’s what that means. It’s bigger than just the dollars. It increases habitat for endangered species, improves the health of the oceans by planting mangrove trees, chips away at climate change through carbon sequestration, equalizes the gender equation by hiring and empowering women as tree planters and managers. It also provides a steady income to loving parents who are now able to afford an education for their children and ensures food security for local communities by planting agroforestry species designed for human use.
“[In 2019], Eden Reforestation Projects provided employment to thousands of full and partial season tree planters, who added more than 196 million desperately needed trees to deforested areas in Madagascar, Haiti, Nepal, Indonesia, Mozambique, Kenya, and Central America.”
Yeah.
We’re with that. Big time.
Conclusion
This website’s not free. We’ve volunteered our time, talent, and money to run this thing since 2016. While we’ve got bills to pay to keep it alive, we didn’t want to let that overshadow the fact that we built this thing for giving – it’s the heart of Beer Chronicle. Giving content is great. Giving dollars is better. Giving content that leads to giving dollars is amazing!
Doing it all while enjoying a fresh, local beer with our friends? What’s better than that?!
To be real transparent, it’s not like we’re getting rich over here off of merch, so we won’t be able to donate thousands, or even hundreds, on a regular basis. But every dollar counts.
Thanks for helping us do that more consistently when you shop at houstonbeer.af. We appreciate you.
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