MAY 3 2020
By Emily Crane Linn, Executive Director
Y’all… I feel like I say this All. The. Time. But our community is just amazing. You truly are. You’re amazing when everything is sunny and smooth—and you’re even more amazing during crazy times like the ones we’re in.
Whether you’re a volunteer who gives your time to support and welcome our clients, a partner agency who collaborates with us to meet their needs or a donor who supports our programs financially, I mean it when I say that we could not do any of this without you.
But today, I want to highlight one group in particular that plays an especially crucial role in fulfilling Canopy’s mission: our Community of Welcome.
Our Community of Welcome is our inner circle.
They’re the ones whose steady, faithful support makes it possible for us to dream big—and to make the Long Welcome happen day by day.
Community of Welcome members give either:
- a recurring monthly gift of $25 or more
- or a recurring annual gift of $300 or more.
And in return, our Community of Welcome members get:
- A new exclusive Community of Welcome t-shirt annually,
- First dibs on event tickets including our Refugee Benefit Dinner that has sold out every year,
- Invitations and tickets to exclusive events like our Canopy Family Picnic and our Holiday Party,
- Insider access to important announcements (like the upcoming announcement about our new Executive Director!)
We established our Community of Welcome a year ago and since then, we have had 42 households join our community! Collectively, they have given over $45,000 since then; this amounts to almost 25 percent of our annual fundraising goal!
This reliable, recurring support is our firm foundation. Every dollar that our Community of Welcome commits to us is a dollar we don’t have to go out and raise through events, campaigns and asks. We never know if our grants are going to be renewed or how much federal funding we’ll receive. We can never say for sure how much our benefit dinner will bring in or whether we’ll meet our end-of-year giving targets.
But because we know we have our Community of Welcome around us, we can still move boldly toward our vision of refugees thriving alongside our community.
This year, our Community of Welcome’s support helped to fund:
-Our after-school program for our refugee children and youth,
-The incredible storytelling you see on this blog, our social media and in our newsletter,
-Our client emergency fund, which provides emergency financial support to clients experiencing extenuating circumstances and emergencies (like the current Covid-19 crisis),
… And so much more. The $45,000 that our Community of Welcome contributed over the past year is equivalent to nearly two years of rent and utilities for Canopy’s office space, a year of salary and benefits for one of our case managers, or six months of rent for up to 10 refugee families.
That’s pretty incredible. But my favorite part is that it wasn’t one person who made all that happen… It was a community. A community of over 42 people who committed to giving what they could—for many, that was $25 a month or just about $5.50 a week. But together, that Community helped us cover nearly 25 percent of our annual fundraising goal. How amazing is that?
So, one year since the creation of our Community of Welcome, we want to say thank you to all of you who chose to make that commitment to Canopy, our mission and our families. Because we have you in our corner, no matter what comes—even a global pandemic—we can move forward fearlessly in welcoming refugees home.
Click here to learn more about the Community of Welcome!
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