Giving Day lasts all year long at CedarWorks

Community/Giving  |  6 years ago

Last week included Giving Tuesday, a great day to donate to some of your favorite causes and help them out this giving season. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on the importance of giving and on what matters to you.

At CedarWorks, giving is part of our company culture. It is included on our website and in our catalog. We are committed to creating a healthier world for children. To that end, we first try to walk the walk through our products and our production methods. Our playsets are built from environmentally-friendly and kid-friendly materials. Our indoor playsets and furniture use ultra-low voc, water based stains, so they are safe for your family. Our outdoor playsets and playhouses are made from Northern White Cedar and don’t require any paints, stains or other chemicals for maintenance. Because it’s untreated, we can even use the wood scraps to help heat our manufacturing facility in cold weather.

Because of our commitment to kids and the environment, our giving program focuses on organizations and events that benefit one or the other (or both). Every year we commit 10% of our profits to these organizations. Our giving is divided into three main programs.

In the Spring, we donate Northern White Cedar seedlings to help small woodlot owners and conservation organizations in Maine for replanting to encourage more Northern White Cedar in its native habitat. Included in this is 11,000 seedlings we ship directly to Aroostook County, the northernmost county in Maine. There, the Upper St. John River Organization works with the Aroostook County Conservation Association to distribute the seedlings as part of their focus on NWC for wildlife habitat and water quality enhancement efforts. In all, we have donated over 600,000 seedlings over the years.

Nationwide, we are promoting our new program, A Chance to Play. This is a program focused on helping small schools raise money for playground equipment.

Finally, because it is important to us to be a good neighbor, we focus a lot of our giving efforts on local organizations in Maine. We donate play equipment to local organizations for their playgrounds, and we donate items that organizations can use to raffle or auction off when they hold fundraisers. Sometimes we sponsor local events if they fit in with our focus on children’s issues. One of our recent favorite donations was of a commercial outdoor playset to the Travis Mills Retreat located in Central Maine. The retreat provides recalibrated veterans and their families a place to rest and relax together. The playset meets ADA requirements, so kids and their parents can all play on it. We are excited and proud to be part of the work of the Travis Mills Foundation.

While the holiday season is a good time to reflect on the importance of giving, we believe that giving should be a year round activity, and we do our best to live by that belief. For more information on our giving programs, visit the Giving Back page of our website. Maine-based non-profit organizations are welcome to inquire about a donation by emailing kristin.sidwell@cedarworks.com.