JACKSON, Mich. — Jackson’s Dawn Foods is starting a partnership with nonprofit For Goodness Cakes, their first corporate sponsor, to celebrate children in foster care on their birthdays.
“There are so many foster children. There are over 400,000 of them in the U.S. at any given time, and most of them are temporary,” co-founder Jaime Lehman said.
Lehman started the idea with co-founder Jess Churchill in California after talking with one of her friends about having a birthday celebration.
“They said, ‘I don’t know. Nobody has ever celebrated my birthday before.’ They had grown up in poverty, and it was just easier not to recognize their birthday,” Lehman said.
So, she sought out to fix that.
“Essentially, a foster child can move up to 10 times in one year just to be shuttled back and forth. There’s not any consistency to say that someone’s going to remember their birthday, and it’s really important for our organization to work with other agencies who specifically care for foster children, foster youth, domestic violence shelters, LGBTQIA+ shelters as well,” Lehman said.
Now, they’re getting the helping hand of Jackson’s Dawn Foods.
“We’re partnering internally and externally with our customers, our employees, team members to be part of the sprinkler squad and to also do a local chapter with bakery buddies where young children are introduced to baking and bakery techniques and cultural bakes where we will help instruct people on cultural flavors, colors and styles of bakery products for different ethnicities,” Dawn Foods Director of Corporate Giving Sarah Richmond said.
You can help out too, but you don’t have to be a master cake decorator to make a difference.
“It’s just been a really amazing experience to see just how much a little bit of effort coming from someone means to someone else who may not have gotten that level of effort before from someone,” Lehman said.
“Please become part of the greater sprinkler squad, whether that’s here in Jackson or one of the local chapters across the United States,” Richmond said. “Please visit our website for more information and learn how you can sign up and be part of the greater sprinkler squad and donate cakes.”
They will open their Jackson chapter sometime over the summer and are still looking for a chapter leader.
If you’re interested in applying, you can click here.
Over the next three years, Dawn Foods will sponsor four new For Goodness Cakes chapter openings as well as five existing ones across the United States.
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