As Labor Day and the lazy days of summer fade and the routine of family life – school, work, activities – returns, we wanted to keep the underlying meaning of “Labor Day” alive “a little longer” and suggest that you talk to the kids in your life about the importance of quality work that produces both sustainable and sustaining products and services. Labor Day is celebrated in many countries and serves as a national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of their country. As your kids go back or get ready to “go back to school” and many new purchases are made for supplies, clothing and other related things, this is a wonderful opportunity to discuss with them how your family can support companies that make sustainability an overt part of their work plan, products, mission and goals.
We have a few “go to sites” where we regularly look to when we shop on line, including our partners at Plastic Antidote. Recently one of those sites, UncommonGoods, reached out to us – out of the blue – to ask if we would help share their Better to Give Program with you! Serendipity we would say…! The Better to Give program connects customers with charities around the globe. With every purchase made, UncommonGoods donate $1 to one of 4 non-profits, RAINN, American Forests, Women for Women, or City Harvest.
Since the Better to Give program started 12 years ago, UncommonGoods has donated over $700,000 to various non-profits. According to Dave Bolotsky the company’s founder: “UncommonGoods Mission begins with the underlying premise that business should be conducted by making sustainability a part of every decision…. Each month, employees from all areas of the company gather to discuss how they can make UncommonGoods more environmentally friendly and socially responsible.”
As stated on the UncommonGoods website, here are some of the ways UncommonGoods does just that:
A Positive Impact: In the Workplace, In the World
To us, sustainability means more than just being “green.” We believe sustainability starts with integrity in everything we do, treating each individual inside and outside our company with dignity and respect, offering health insurance to all our full-time (and most part-time) employees and providing a living wage.
Handmade, Recycled and Organic Products
We’re committed to offering you a creative and exciting merchandise assortment and are working with our suppliers – from artists to small manufacturers – to make their products in a more socially and environmentally responsible manner. Since our founding, we’ve featured products that contain recycled components and have not sold products containing leather, feathers or fur – our goal is to sell no product that harms humans or animals.
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
We are an Internet and catalog company, and we understand that by producing a catalog we use the earth’s resources. We try our best to minimize that impact by shifting more business online, limiting how many catalogs we mail, and printing our catalogs on either recycled paper (virtually all of which is from 30% post-consumer waste) or paper sourced from FSC certified forests (which are harvested in a sustainable manner).
Better To Give
Giving back is important to us and we want to share this passion with our customers. That’s why we created the Better to Give Program in 2001, which allows you to select a non-profit organization to receive a $1 donation from us at checkout. Learn more here.
B Corporation
UncommonGoods is proud to be a founding member of B Corporation, an organization created to help customers understand the social and environmental impact of their purchases. The B seal means that a company has met the standards outlined in a comprehensive screening questionnaire, which evaluates a company on issues ranging from providing a living wage, to lessening their impact on the environment, to giving back to the community.
At ClimateMama we are happy to highlight UncommonGoods and it’s philosophy, mission and way of doing business as a model that, if other companies adopted, we feel would make the world a much better place. Thanks UncommonGoods!
Yours,
Climate Mama
Full disclosure: We received NO financial compensation for this post. However, UncommonGoods did agreed to give $50 to one of the non-profit organizations they support, on our behalf. In light of the recent forest fires burning across our country and the role that climate change is having in changing the intensity and scope of wildfires, we wanted to help support the ongoing work of American Forests.
