Today, we return home to Grand Rapids, Michigan with our last, and most heart wrenching video blog with Chad Stoub, Owner of EverKept Disposal. Chad and his brother, Jason, run a successful local hauling company and every time I see their garbage trucks I giggle...
Today we bring you a longer video blog about a very special woman and her family. Many of you know of the extremely talented Baldwin family, or shall I say all the Baldwin men, but did you know that all those brothers are supported and loved by their sister Elizabeth (Beth) Baldwin? We first met Beth five years ago when she started ordering Pink Carts for various fund raising activities in New York state. The family co-operatively support the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund in honor of their Mother, a breast cancer survivor.
We sure hope you are enjoying meeting some of our Pink Cart partners across the country, as we have certainly loved reconnecting with each and every one of them. This week we bring you David Boon and his family business Boon & Sons in Rochester, New York.
This week we would like to introduce you to the wonderful Mayor of Gloucester Township in sunny New Jersey. Mayor David Mayer was elected into office in 2010 and one of his first initiatives was to help the township lower costs and become more environmentally sustainable. A great way to do that is to get valuable recyclables out of the solid waste stream and into a recycling cart, which can then be picked up and taken to a recycling center and turned into money for the township - and reduce trash at the same time!
Happy Monday, October 1st, and the first day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month! We are so excited to share what we have been up to these last few months, as we have been travelling and re-connecting with our Pink Cart partners across the country. Many of them in communities near you!
As I blogged about in August, The Pink Cart Team decided to celebrate our upcoming ten year anniversary by visiting folks that have taken our little Pink Cart idea and built on it in their own community, and the results are astounding.
Hard to believe it has been close to nine years since we launched The Pink Cart program! To-date we have sold more than 140,000 Pink Carts and raised more than $665,000, all donated to the American Cancer Society (ACS) for breast cancer programs. While these are AMAZING numbers, and honestly far surpassed our early hopes and dreams, the numbers are actually much larger if we include the impact our Kick Cancer To The Curb idea has had in communities that we serve with partners.
It’s remarkable to think that it has been four years since the idea for The Pink Cart™ was born. I’ve told the story a hundred times about how I honestly believed if we could sell just a few thousand carts we would be able to turn curbsides pink and start a conversation. Within days of shipping our first carts we were getting calls and emails from people wanting to know where they could get one, strangers stopping at people’s houses to take pictures and send them to friends and family.
We are doing a little jig, ok a BIG jig, over here at the Pink Cart team headquarters because we just BLEW through a financial goal of raising $250,000 for the American Cancer Society!!! THAT is a lot of money and we know that every penny is going to the important work of research and breast cancer awareness across this great country. Did you know that when you buy a Pink Cart in your community your $5 makes it back there?
It's November now and all the hype around October and it being breast cancer awareness month has dissipated. The Pink cart team was super busy all month with contests and give aways and blogging and general traffic on the Facebook page and our website. Now it's quiet and it feels like everyone has packed up and gone home. The traffic on our Facebook page has dramatically dropped off and while that is just fine, it tells us something.
This weekend we celebrated my Father's 90th birthday. He is a good man who is still extremely active and independent - at 90 he lives alone, works, plays golf, travels and dates women younger than me (which will have to be the subject of a later blog :)) There was a 13 year age difference between my Mom and Dad and so when Mom died so young from breast cancer it really rocked him to his very core. He never expected to get left. You know that feeling...being left behind. It's debilitating.