December 4, 2024

 

Dear Cornbread Friends,

 

It’s been a cold and dark November, but I’ve never been more full of hope for Baltimore. I feel proud of and ambitious for us. I believe in who we are. Baltimore has warmth, hospitality, humor, grit, and amazingly high levels of Smalltimore interconnectedness. And so does Love & Cornbread. We were made for tough times. Want to focus on the things you can control? Want to get hyperlocal? Want to try a new approach to an old problem? Yup, that’s Love & Cornbread. Please join me in celebrating all we accomplished together in 2024 and all we plan to do in 2025. And as a special bonus, we’re offering a line of custom-designed L&C thank you gifts to donors while supplies last - click here to see the gifts or click here to go straight to the donation page. 

 

Love & Cornbread had an amazing 2024:

• We served 20K delicious, from-scratch meals that we would be proud to serve in our own homes.

• Thanks to our dedicated volunteers, we showed up every single Saturday outside the Phase 2 barber shop to serve those meals, never missing a week, for the fourth year in a row.

• We created jobs for two talented culinary professionals, Chef AJ and Chef Jessica.

• We threw our first big Valentine’s Day party and more than 300 of you showed up to have a fantastic time.

• Thanks to that party, we were able to purchase The Cornbreadmobile, allowing us to transport and deliver more meals every week.

• We launched a new monthly program for our elders in Penn North called Golden Gatherings that supports their mental health as well as providing a healthy meal and gentle exercise.

• We found an unfilled niche in the catering landscape and began selling our hearty, kid-friendly PowerUP! meals to after-school programs looking for better ways to feed their students.

• And while most of the funds that support our mission this year came from foundations and individual donors, we began for the first time to generate our own revenue thanks to the success of our PowerUP! Meals.

 

And as we look ahead to 2025, Love & Cornbread will:

 

• Continue to serve the Penn North community the same high quality meals we’d be proud to serve in our own homes,both through regular Saturday outreach and our new senior-focused programs

• Expand the number of clients we sell healthy, kid-friendly PowerUP! Meals to as a way to fund our mission

• Launch Love & Cornbread bake-at-home cornbread mix, the first in a line of socially conscious gift boxes we’ll sell in support of our mission

• And by the end of 2025, each purchase of a Love & Cornbread gift box will provide a week of PowerUP! Meals for a kid in Baltimore City after-school program.

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Love & Cornbread’s goal for next year is to balance the grants and donations we receive with an independent and sustainable social enterprise that generates its own revenue. We want to be able to deliver on our mission without depending on any single funding source. And we want to continue creating meaningful jobs for Baltimore residents and contributing to our city’s economic growth.  

 

We need your help to pull off this ambitious plan. 2025 will be a key transitional year for us as we develop and launch our new products, build out our team, and serve more meals to the community than ever before. Everything Love & Cornbread does is and will continue to be rooted in our mission of increasing food equity in Baltimore by cooking from scratch and serving with love. 

 

As mentioned above, in appreciation for your support of our mission, we’re excited to offer exclusive Love & Cornbread themed thank-you gifts while quantities last. We hope you’ll love them as much as we do. Click here to see the thank you gifts, and click here to go straight to the donation page. For detailed information on making a gift from a donor advised fund, see the bottom of the donation page. 

 

We’re excited about 2025 for Baltimore and for Love & Cornbread, and we hope you are too. Please join us and let’s build the Baltimore we want to live in, together. 

 

With Love & Cornbread,

Sue May

Founder and Executive Director