This week we are launching our Church Alley ❤️ Gulf Coast giving program. Each quarter we will be donating 10% of sales on a specific item in the shop towards an organization that nourishes, empowers, and serves the Gulf Coast. We are launching this program by donating to BISCO. BISCO’s mission is:
to build a powerful, multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-issue organization that serves as a voice for the people of Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes in southeastern Louisiana, as well as Grand Isle in Southern Jefferson Parish.
We are everyday and ordinary church people working together with our ministers to bring about positive changes in our communities.
Our vision is to create safe, just, healthy and sustainable communities where we can prosper and grow, enjoying the benefits of a diverse and healthy ecosystem.
BISCO commits to using faith-based community organizing to empower residents to effect positive change related to typical social justice issues such as poverty, illiteracy and racism, and to Katrina-Rita-Gustav-Ike recovery issues such as environmental health hazards, loss of housing, employment, and infrastructure. Additionally, BISCO’s biggest challenge is directed to addressing the massive humanitarian, economic, environmental, cultural and social impacts facing our community and the world as a result of devastating man-made coastal land loss in our area.
During the BP Oil Disaster I worked for the Waterkeeper Alliance based in New Orleans but working with fishing and coastal communities from Galveston, TX to Apalachicola, FL. I spent a lot of time with the people from BISCO in Gulf Coast wide meetings as we all tried to make sense of what was happening. While it was an incredibly stressful time for our coastal communities, Sharon, Patty and the rest of the staff and members were bright lights of laughter, wisdom, and encouragement. A reminder of the strength and resiliency of bayou culture. A culture we must protect for generations to come.
You can learn more about BISCO here. Our black t-shirts are on sale now for $28, 10% of those sales will be donated. We are just at the beginning of our our Church Alley ❤️ Gulf Coast giving and can’t wait to see how big of an impact our community can make.
Church Alley is a mission driven business. We aim to nourish, empower and serve the Gulf Coast. In order to understand if we are achieving our mission we need to collect data. So this year we created a dynamic database to track our social and environmental impacts, but we are also including all of our vendors. We want to track and understand our full impact as it relates to a triple bottom line. We usually think of businesses as having a profit and that’s usually the end of our understanding what businesses do. But there is a theory called Triple Bottom Line, where businesses create ways to understand their social and environmental profits as well as their economic one.
While we often think of profits in terms of money for the business and impact as what we do for the community, inherent in this theory is that positively impacting the community is also profit for the business. It’s not charity, it’s a key to thriving long term. If my customers aren’t happy, healthy, and safe, they aren’t going to spend money and time at my business. We have a place in making sure the business community is creating a sustainable world. It’s not a passion project or nice to do. It’s all connected.
So this is one of our major goals in the next year. Track, understand and share our full impact. You can learn more about the theory around a triple bottom line in this article here.
This has been a long journey and honestly it’s been incredibly frustrating. Running a business is complicated and difficult and it is often hard to accomplish all your goals. Before I could do this, I had to make sure the business itself was viable. That I could weather the storms and create a profitable business. Now that we have so many processes in place to maintain our successes, we are moving forward with this original goal. Once we have a good amount of data, I will be releasing annuals reports in an effort of full transparency but also to help model this business idea for other small businesses. Small businesses like mine make up 50% of the GDP or roughly $6 trillion each year. That’s a huge impact on our economy.
The past 7 years has been an amazing learning experience and I’m so excited to be inching closer to this goal.
Thanks for being part of Church Alley!