Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter

June 9, 2020

To our community,

We’ve spent time planning and reflecting as a team on what we can do to support anti-racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. It should be clear that Great Jones is unequivocal in its condemnation of racism, racist violence, and abuse of power against Black people — and we’re extremely sorry if our silence during the planning process this past week indicated otherwise.

As a first of many actions, we will be donating 100% of our profits over the span of one week (June 10 to 17) to three organizations. The first: Black Earth Farms, a grassroots Pan-African and Pan-Indigenous farming collective in the East Bay that is currently delivering free food to Black people who have been arrested, bailed, injured, or traumatized during protests in Oakland. We believe in the power of cooking to offer comfort, energy, and sustenance during a critical time.

The second: Black & Brown Founders, which provides community, education, and tools to Black and Latinx entrepreneurs, allowing them to launch and build startups. We have benefited from great privilege as a venture-capital-backed startup founded by white women, and it’s important for everyone to have access to the kinds of resources that make companies like Great Jones possible.

The third: Know Your Rights Camp, started by Colin Kaepernick. Their mission is to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation. We believe that supporting young people is one of the best investments, especially as it’s clear we need new leadership in this country.

Any Great Jones purchases you make from June 10 to 17 will go toward these organizations. We’ve also created a database of Black-authored recipes and cookbooks. We hope that as you continue to spend more time than usual cooking at home, you try and appreciate recipes from voices who are underrepresented and underappreciated in white-led food media. We welcome additions to this list, and we also urge you to purchase their cookbooks to support these authors financially. We’ll continue to share our additional plans for sustaining our anti-racism efforts across different aspects of Great Jones, and how we can operationalize our values so they’re a sustained and meaningful part of our corporate culture and community presence.

Love,

Team Great Jones