Together We Doubled Our Impact!

...295 days to go...

A month ago we donated $50K to the Ballard Food Bank. As I wrote then, I believe the impact of that gift was not only about 16,700 meals, but also one person who would be able to avoid becoming homeless because they could avoid spending so much money on food. BFB chose to structure the gift as a ‘match’ of any donation from the community of (i) at least $150 or (ii) in the form of a recurring monthly pledge.

I’m thrilled to report that not only was the match met, but BFB raised multiple times our $50K thanks to an outpouring of generosity from our community. In comparison to the same period last year, BFB doubled the number of donors contributing $150 or more, and also doubled the number new monthly donor sign-ups. I know that at least a few readers of this blog were among those making generous donations - from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

As a result, I’m evolving the way I think about the impact of our original donation to include the matching dollars. Together, we’ve provided 33,400 meals and helped two people avoid homelessness. Also, Jen and I were so inspired that we donated an additional $10K to BFB, which adds another 3K meals.

I’ve added a new page to this website called ‘Impact’ where I’ll keep an ongoing tally of the difference we’ve been able to make, together. To be fair, it’s probably not possible to know how much the match and the blog influenced donations outside of our direct contributions. As a result, I’ve created the chart in two colors: black shows the impact of our direct donations, while gray shows what I’ll call the ‘catalyzed impact’ - basically donations from the community that may have been influenced by A Handful of Coins. I’ll try to be fairly strict about what gets included in gray as the year goes on, to make sure it only includes impact for which a strong argument can be made that it wouldn’t have happened without this project.

Please keep an eye on it periodically to see how our impact takes shape as the year progresses!