9/11/2020 Foundry Giving Friday: Ampersand Families

• Posted on 11 September 2020
• Posted in Foundry Giving Friday
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Every Friday The Foundry Home Goods donates 5% of our total sales to a different community-nominated small-and-mighty cause. This Friday's Foundry Giving Friday recipient? Ampersand Families!

Ampersand Families is a St. Paul-based non-profit that works specifically with older children and sibling groups in the child welfare and foster care systems to establish permanent safe and stable family relationships for them.

The crucial thing is called "Permanency". The feeling of support, constancy, love, and security, that comes from having a place that is yours. A home. A family. A place with room for breathing and for growth, a safe space to put down the adrenaline responses of survival and be soft and become authentic, to bloom. "Permanency" is something that's pretty darn easy to take for granted if you've only known it and, once you start thinking about it, it's pretty heartbreaking to imagine living without through flaws in a system you did not opt into.

Hundreds of Minnesota youth (think: kiddoes 10+) find themselves in an untenable position through no fault of their own: growing up without a stable support network and with little chance of finding and joining a family before they age out of a system that at times seems designed to fail them...and what happens then? Ampersand Families works on the personal level to give kids the dignity of "Permanency" that they deserve, to find them forever homes and support all parties on the wild journey with the generosity and openness required to get there, and also on an advocacy and policy level, helping address and correct systemic issues and failures with the deep institutional knowledge of "how it works in practice". It's some pretty powerful stuff. See more here.

We are pleased and proud to support this excellent Minnesota-based organization this Foundry Giving Friday! If you don't need anything from us, consider supporting them directly  If you DO find yourself in need of beeswax or bulk supplies, know that your purchase goes to support good change happening on the community level.

Thanks to Jackie for the stellar nomination!

If YOU have a worthy cause to nominate for our Foundry Giving Friday initiative, pop on over to our Nomination Page and drop us a line. We're all in this together.