Black Lives Matter

how we raised money… for transparency & so it can be replicated

Short version

We are a worker-owned bakery. We offered our recipe for West Side Sourdough and guide to sourdough culture maintenance as a reward for a $20+ donation receipt to any cause/org/person relevant to Black Lives Matter. We kept the donation parameters undefined to encourage people to explore the many facets of this civil rights crisis and the needs of Black people in America. Our (majority white) followers & customers sent us their receipts. We got local white-owned businesses and individual donors to match the total dollar amount as it grew. In total, $17,959 was donated to over 50 recipients ranging from personal GoFundMes to the NAACP. If we could do it, maybe you could too.

Already donated? Find & follow people already doing the work in Buffalo including Black Love Resists in the Rust and SURJ Buffalo to take your next steps!!!

Scroll down for the long version and list of donors.

The recipients

We’ve listed the places that received over $300. Look into these, or find a lesser known org doing crucial work, and consider a donation of your own! (bonus points if it’s recurring) Another impactful donation option we recommend: contributing to individual GoFundMes/personal fundraisers for Black people.

$6,670 to Black Love Resists in the Rust

$2,520 to Feed Buffalo

$1,477 to individuals/memorials/GoFundMes

$1,246 to bail funds

$1,185 to African Heritage Food Co-op

$750 to Loveland Foundation

$584 to Color of Change

$500 to The Okra Project

$479 to NAACP Legal Defense Fund

$350 to Fruit Belt Community Land Trust

$300 to Black Lives Matter

$1,149 to Campaign Zero*

*After we recommended donating, Campaign Zero launched their #8cantwait campaign which was criticized by people we respect so we removed it from our list of recommendations.

Long version

This donation drive got very big very fast! We didn’t do it for PR, it’s a continuation of work we’ve been doing (quietly) for almost four years… but we got loud and got all of you involved this time. We are not interested in talking to press about this because ours is not the voice that should be heard at this moment, and this fundraiser is not a substitute for the other work we need to be doing continuously as a white-owned business to try and obliterate white supremacy in our bakery, our city and ourselves. We are so glad to be able to use our platform to draw attention to the people & orgs that can use your support both locally and nationally… and we will try to keep using this platform to support and not to speak over.

Some backstory

We’re a worker-owned cooperative bakery founded in 2014. In late 2016, two things happened: our business was finally becoming profitable, and Donald Trump was elected. At a time where we’d never felt more hopeless about human nature (and human rights!) we got great advice: when you don’t know what to do, there’s often someone already doing the work so find them, support them… and ideally FUND THEM. So we set aside 5% of our retail bread sales at the cafe and were able to donate at least a few hundred dollars every month. Over the last few years, you can chart the crises in our country and the world by where our donations went. With the pandemic this year, we closed the cafe for our safety and so did not have the income to devote to donations - we wanted to save what we had. Then came the George Floyd footage, and while as individuals we’d been angry about racism/white supremacy for quite some time, as a business we’d never been very vocal apart from our donations.

How it went

We knew we didn’t have a lot of cash on hand but our followers were ready and willing to support a good cause, so we wanted to give them an extra push to donate if they’d already been considering it. We had just written a home version of our signature sourdough bread recipe to accompany sales of our sourdough starter, and saw an opportunity to provide a PDF download as an incentive for foodies and home bakers to donate over $20 (remember when everyone got into home baking?) We could afford to donate $1000 and figured we’d be able to round up at least one other business to match the couple thousand we foresaw raising. To cut down on admin and encourage people to fund individuals and small projects as well as national orgs, we let individuals and donors choose where their money went and pledged to match the total donation amount, if not the exact recipients. (This was great but also hard to communicate.)

People had been generously sharing resources & donation opportunities online, so we shared them to our audience on Instagram and Twitter (we don’t really get Facebook, but did one post about our campaign there too.) We felt good about doing a donation drive because our followers are largely white and it is appropriate for us (especially as West Side residents!!!) to fund this movement’s action and healing.

We clearly underestimated the number of people ready to open their wallets. The next few days were a blur of answering emails, spamming our stories with “swipe up!” donation links, awkwardly sliding into other white-owned businesses’ DMs, cheering as matching donors appeared out of thin air, and bookmarking every donation suggestion we saw on Twitter while doomscrolling through the constantly generated police brutality protest clips. When the dust cleared (and a dear friend tallied up every individual donation,) we had almost $18,000 in donation receipts.

You don’t have to stay quiet about what you believe in to stay in business. Our follower count is pretty much the same as before! Our best guess is that our customers support us because we are outspoken about things ranging from worker ownership to local food economies to the need to end white supremacy. For others looking to do similar campaigns: build on your previous work, meet your audience where they are, and try to walk them/yourself one or two steps forward. Don’t be afraid to post a lot, but try not to prioritize your own voice instead of the movement.

We also promise we aren’t as intense in person and you can come pick up a sandwich in peace.

Disclaimers

This fundraiser clearly ran on the honor system: many of the receipts were screenshots and we can’t verify them all. We wouldn’t guarantee that this fundraiser was everyone’s motivation for donating, and thus would feel weird taking the credit for all the money raised. We’re just glad that we could do something with our substantial audience on social media… and introduce them to the orgs and people doing the work locally.

The donors

Pretzel tier: matched $1,000+

Bison Botanics

BreadHive

Buffalo Alternative Therapies

Community Beer Works

Lexington Co-op

Bagel tier: matched $500+

Buffalo Eats

Public Espresso

Two anonymous individual donors

Scone tier: matched $250+

Barre Centric

Paloma Exchange

Three anonymous individual donors

Cookie tier

192 people like you!!!

Extra Credit

One person donated $1000 in return for our soft pretzel recipe

Another donated $150 in return for our chocolate salted rye cookie recipe