Jewelry for Charity

Earlier this month, I had a jewelry party at my mom's house and donated 10% of my sales to WINGS Guatemala, a charity providing quality reproductive healthcare and education to the Guatemalan people. This might sound familiar since I posted about it at the time.


I received a nice thank-you letter from WINGS the other day and the idea of business and charity has been on my mind a lot since then. Giving back is important to me, and with my business beginning to flourish, I like the idea of helping others through the sale of my jewelry and beads. So I've decided to select a charity each month to support, and a percentage of my entire sales for that month (I'm thinking 5%) will be donated to that charity. I'm going to finish out the month of May supporting WINGS, and June's charity will be Vegan Outreach.


My plan is to rotate each month (although after a while I will probably start repeating some of the same ones - my favorites), spreading my donations among humanitarian and animal causes, both locally and worldwide. I'm not making a ton of money right now, so my donations might not be huge, but it feels good to do something (anything!), and as my business hopefully continues to grow, so too will my contributions to these agencies doing good works in the world.

If you have suggestions for future charities for me to support, feel free to pass them along! I'll keep you posted about each month's new charity here on my blog.

On another note, I want to promote the idea of gift shopping on Etsy. There are so many amazing artists and incredible products on Etsy, and most people I know would rather have a totally unique, handmade gift than some mass-produced crap from WalMart (I know I would). I've decided to try as hard as I can to buy all my gifts on Etsy from here on out - it probably won't work for Matt, since all he ever wants is car parts, but I think I'll be able to do about 80-90% of my gift shopping there.

This month I bought this shirt for my brother's birthday (you'd have to know him to understand), and I just ordered something for my Mom's upcoming birthday. (I'm not going to post a link yet because she reads this, but I'll share later! I thought she might be ready to receive something other than my jewelry on every gift-giving occasion.) So, whether you buy something from me or from another of the many talented people selling on Etsy, enjoy your shopping experience and bask in the glow of knowing that your purchase is supporting independent artists! And if you get overwhelmed by the vast selection (it can happen), get in touch with me and I'll help you find the perfect gift for whoever you're shopping for, or for yourself - ooh, I could be an Etsy personal shopping assistant! Fun!

Eek, that was another word-heavy post. Here's a picture of Hazel (alpha dog extraordinaire).