(Quick note — if you haven’t gone to Rebubble.com and signed up for their emails, you really should. For example, they have a sitewide 20% sale going today. Getting great stuff from talented artists is wonderful, but getting a deal on it? Awesome!).

If you’ve bought anything from our Redbubble store, or from our Etsy store, in the past three months, you just did something very cool.

Four times a year, we take 25% of everything we’ve sold and buy something for a charity. Right now, we’re supporting Opening Doors, a charity that helps refugees resettling in California. These people arrive in the U.S. with next to nothing. They’re often fleeing violence and the threat of death, so they don’t get to bring much. The charity finds them housing and helps them get started with language classes, help navigating getting the kids into school, how to get around using public transportation, etc.

So what did you do? You helped buy bus passes so that people who don’t have the money even to ride the bus can get to the doctor, or get the kids enrolled in school, or buy groceries. Often refugees arrive from places that don’t have much in the way of public transportation, and they don’t know the city. Volunteers show them how to use public transit to get where they need to go, taking them to appointments. It makes a new and intimidating place just a bit more familiar.

Opening Doors also collects items for “welcome kits,” including pots and pans, dishes, etc. When it’s time to turn part of our sales into donations, we contact the charity and ask what they need most. This time, Opening Doors asked for bus passes, so that’s what we donated.

We. Not just Mark and me… if you bought anything from us in the last three months, you’re part of “we.” You bought bus passes and donated them to a charity. You are part of the day someone gets a bus pass, leaving $7 in his or her budget for food, or school supplies for the kids, or medicine.

So thank you. We thank you, and they thank you. Enjoy being a patron of the arts (buying something from a small arts business like ours makes you a patron of the arts), and a humanitarian. As a friend of ours says, “You are awesome! Own it! Own it!”