Community support
The work is local. So is the giving.
We are a small company in Washington, and we would rather put our weight behind a few things properly than spread a logo across a dozen. Here is where it goes, and what we actually do.
Who we partner with
Our partner OurTown pairs a local business with a local cause.
OurTown is a Vancouver, Washington marketplace with a simple idea behind it: a local business sells what it already sells, picks a local cause, and a share of every sale goes there. The buyer gets the thing they wanted. The cause gets a check it did not have to fundraise for.
What we contribute is the software. We built the marketing kit that turns one campaign into the sixty-odd assets a small business could never make itself, and the desk their team works from. A good deal of that we gave rather than billed, because building things is the most useful thing we have to give. Some of the work ahead will be ordinary paid work, the way it is between any two companies — and payment for that kind of work is not always cash. If it ever includes a stake in OurTown, this page will say so plainly. You should know how we are paid before you take a recommendation from us.
It is deliberately unglamorous and genuinely small. We would rather tell you that than dress it up.
To be plain about it: OurTown is not us. It is a separate company — its own owners, its own marketplace, its own decisions — and we neither own it nor run it. We build software for them and we send people their way. Nothing on this page is said on their behalf. We name the partnership because it is how we reach local causes, not because the two are the same thing.
Who we back
Two causes, both local, both pointed at kids.
The name stands for Help One Person Every Day. The Oberst family started it after a long run of hard years of their own, and it does crisis response, mentoring and youth work. Hoops for H.O.P.E., their 3-on-3 basketball tournament, is one of the two weekends the year turns on.
Visit H.O.P.E. for the Good →Camps and clinics for kids in Vancouver, Washington, under a banner that is hard to argue with: supporting youth through basketball. Coaching, court time and a place to be on a weekend — the unglamorous things that keep a kid in the game.
Visit Vancouver Youth Basketball →Both links open in a new tab. We are not on either board and we do not speak for them — anything you read here, read on their own site too.
There are more than two
The rest of the list is on OurTown.
These two are the ones we put our own name behind. They are not the whole picture — OurTown carries other local causes, and every one of them is there because a local business chose it rather than because a marketing department did. If you want to see who else is on it, or you run a business and want to put it behind a cause of your own, that is the place to go.
That button opens OurTown in a new tab, because it is their site and not ours. OurTown runs its own marketplace, its own cause approvals and its own payments — we are a partner, not the operator.