Love Coffee? Us too! Give a gift that gives back this holiday!
We recently partnered with our friends from Solid Roasters to bring you quality coffee delivered right to your doorstep. This is big news just in time for the holidays for our fans living in the US. Now you can support Courageous Kitchen, with a cup of coffee, and when gifting coffee to a loved one. By purchasing a monthly subscription, you’ll receive two fair trade bags of high quality, whole or ground beans AND help us continue to provide food aid and education to marginalized youth.
Our roasters believe that coffee’s cultural pervasiveness has a unique advantage to shine light in dark places. They’ve sourced direct-trade beans from under-funded farmers, addressing the power imbalances typically found in organic growing methods. These ethical sourcing methods incentivize the quality of the beans. Whether bold, blonde, sweet, or rich, the distinct blends focus on the nuance and personality of each bean and region.
Were currently offering three single origin choices:
Light | Ethiopian Coffee
Medium | Colombian Coffee
Dark | Guatemalan Coffee
Ethically Sourced
Freshly Roasted
Gives Back
By purchasing a monthly coffee subscription you’re helping us supply a family with rice, and other supplies that will help combat the ills of malnutrition. Let’s share the beauty of speciality coffee, provide a fair wage to farmers, and spread love to the families in need this holiday!
This month we’re hosting some events in Bangkok to encourage more of our supporters to consider becoming a sponsor to families Courageous Kitchen supports each month. These are simply families struggling in the communities we serve. Often they have students participating in our pre-school or our Saturday classes for teens.
The educational support we provide free, creates an environment where we can befriend families and find out more about them. For instance, inquiring about a missing student could lead us to find they have been hospitalized or cannot participate in classes because they’re caring for a sick parent. In these instances, we’re able to intervene with emergency support for medical, housing, and food needs. This is only possible because of our recurring donors who give $50 or less each month, most of them giving around $10.
Our larger donors allow us to reach out to a family in need and transform their circumstance by giving them some stability. For example, we recently had a donor wanting to help with medical needs. Their desire to help was timely because one of our teen girls had two younger siblings who had been in and out of the hospital. The worried parents had taken the children to the hospital so often, they owed medical bills that would take them months and month to pay back. Worse than the stack of medical bills was that the children’s health had also not been improving.
Today they are incredibly thankful to their sponsor. In a short amount of time they were able to use the extra sponsorship money to get the sick siblings to a better hospital, begin paying their old debts, and not have to worry about pulling their eldest daughter from classes simply because they could not afford both the medical bills and her tuition.
With your help we can give this piece of mind to more struggling families by bolstering their ability to put food on the table, live in safe housing, and send their children to school. That’s what we’re really all about! Please keep us in mind this holiday and consider sponsoring a family. If you have any questions about the donation process, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Thank you and wishing a belated happy Thanksgiving to all of our supporters!
The great photos in the update are the work of volunteer photographer Kelly Tobias.
Holiday giving season is upon us and we’ve just updated our website with Stripe integration to make it easier to take donations! This means whether you’re doing a one time meal sponsorship or interested in setting up a recurring donation to help a family in 2017, it’s easier and fee free for a limited time!
The Credit Card Option & Incremental Giving
A few of you have written to us about problems with Paypal accounts, or trouble donating from certain places around the world. We’re happy to report these issues should mostly be sorted out and as a registered charity we’re approved for the Stripe Nonprofit program. This means the first $15,000 we raise online before next November, will not be charged any fees! In the future we’ll still be eligible for a discount on fees, but keep in mind this deal is exclusively for Courageous Kitchen in 2017!
When you make a donation on our website the default option should be set to credit card. This processing option is Stripe and you can enter your information securely by following the pop down menus. Paypal lovers don’t fret the option is still available for those who prefer this method and we’ve added a page to explain other donation options too.
Online shoppers can give small amounts incrementally, but these donations add up!
Finally online shoppers don’t forget you can search for “Courageous Kitchen” in the nonprofit programs on your favorite sites such as Amazon and Ebay. Select us are your charity of choice and when you check out a small percentage of your payment will go towards our efforts creating leaders!
2017 Giving Campaigns
For the holiday and on into 2017 you will see us promoting two giving campaigns. The first is to get our classes funded for the full year next year, with a fundraising goal of $10,000. This is money to cover our shopping expenses for each meal and additional would help us to get more advanced equipment (we are currently only cooking on gas woks) and much needed safety equipment for our fast action kitchen (first aid kids, new fire extinguishers, etc…). This part of the project is the heart of our story and we’ve made the options for giving flexible with a $1 donation to give a plate of food to a student, up to sponsoring an entire cooking class for $100 (you can also choose a custom amount to donate).
The second mission for 2017 is to get as many families sponsored as possible in our community. As we build stronger families, we also want to strengthen the family unit our students go back to after class. Your sponsorship could enable a family to find safer housing, afford the children in the family a chance to see the doctor, and purchase food and medication. These recurring donations are also better for small organizations like ours, as they allow us to forecast giving into the future and respond quickly to emergency needs.
Thank you for your support and sticking with us as we’ve grown over the past year, we’re confident great things are on the horizon in 2017!
