9/9/2022 Foundry Giving Friday: Dan's MPS First Grade Classroom Wishlists

• Posted on 8 September 2022
• Posted in Foundry Giving Friday
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Every Friday The Foundry Home Goods contributes 5% of our total sales to a different community-nominated small-and-mighty cause. This Friday's Foundry Giving Friday recipient? Dan's MPS First Grade Classroom Wishlists!

In honor of back-to-school and the Giving Friday spirit of hyper-local community building, this week we're doing our own version of "Clearing The List".

You may have heard about "Clearing The List" but in case you haven't: it's a great/bittersweet/complicated thing where (historically and epically underfunded) teachers make dream lists of basic supplies (construction paper, pencils, markers, that *good* glue etc. basics that they would usually choose to pay for out of their own pockets, wholly out of love and care for the young minds in their charge), put those lists on Amazon (so that problematic billionaires can have non-unionized workers put them into carbon-heavy-pre-consumer cardboard boxes at the tail end of 12 hour shifts to be shipped directly into your brain by a drone in less than an hour...isn't that how all that works??), and generous community members across the country "clear their lists" by purchasing those necessities for them.

ANYWAY. We LOVE this idea, and we LOVE the humans at the beginning and end of the chain who are working from positions of heroic selflessness and generosity within a system that is not structured to reward such things. SO. We thought we could skip the freighted middlepeople, keep all of the chains local, and go straight to the sources: MPS Public School Teachers and our beloved, engaged community. Luckily—and recently, thanks to the powers invested in Ruby by the great state of Minnesota—we happen to officially have one of the former in the Foundry Family and, thanks to the powers invested in US by YOU we have our incredible Foundry community right here, right now.

We're teaming up with our favorite 1st grade MPS public school teacher/Lillian's freshly minted husband, Dan (seriously, how sweet is he in that tiny chair up there!), to stock a few classrooms + teachers locally with their dream wishlists of much needed supplies. No Amazon required.

If you don't need anything from us and want to get in on action, get in touch and we can help facilitate.

If you DO find yourself in need of anything from us, know that your purchase goes to support good change happening on the community level.

Thanks to our wordsmith Susannah for the nomination idea. Her daughter is still talking about a joke about clouds Dan told her 7 months ago (punchline: THUNDERPANTS!). Get this guy some glue sticks already!

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.

And, as if you needed further proof that teachers are everything/deserve the world and more, please enjoy this piece of art made for Dan by one of his students eight years ago—his first year of teaching: