Bread + Butter Project

We are thrilled to have Pettengill House, Inc. as our first food pantry partner. The nonprofit organization provides basic needs, emergency assistance, prevention education, case management, and supports to residents of Salisbury, Amesbury, Newburyport, Merrimac, West Newbury, Newbury, Rowley, Byfield and Groveland. You can learn more about them at http://www.pettengillhouse.org/. The Pettengill House Food Pantry provides staple food and personal care products to individuals,children, and families in need. We're donating 50% of net profits from bread + butter T-shirt sales during the months of September and October to support their food pantry, so buy a lot and help spread the word!

Sue, Katie, Emma and I had our first business meeting over dinner last night, and it was a very interesting discussion. We started to talk about identifying our next partners, where we want to go next in terms of geography, what goals we should set to measure our success and how we would track our progress. Sue and I had to remind ourselves that some of the business concepts that we're familiar with are still completely foreign to the girls, so we had a lot of explaining to do. We generally agreed that we want to identify another local food pantry partner to follow our work with Pettengill this fall, that we would get involved with a month-long project in Boston in January, and would try to expand our work with partners in each New England state by the end of Q1 2010. We would then plan to move to states with the largest population centers and the greatest potential for sales. We all thought it would be really cool if we could make a difference in all 50 states by the end of our first year. Katie and Emma will do some research to determine state populations and where we should go next. In the meantime, we could use our readers' recommendations on an additional food pantry partner on the North Shore, as well as potential partners in CT, ME, NH, RI, and VT.

Katie also had a good idea about finding a visual of a map of the US that we could use to highlight our partnerships and track sales in each state and add this to our website. Emma expressed an interest in more T-shirt designs, which led to a discussion about how we need to plan for the introduction of new products and product lines. We still have so much to learn, but we're off to a good start and really enjoying it.

-Tom

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