Welcome to in our hands cards
It's Friday September 20, 2024. We (I) have launched in our hands cards! In our hands cards exists to foster connection and flourishing for all. We do this by helping ourselves (me) and others (you) send messages that matter. Here is how we do this:
- We make one-of-a-kind greeting cards. We share plenty of information about the card for fellow context-lovers out there, like the card's creation date, story, materials, etc.
- We donate a portion of the sale price of each card to an outstanding charity. We convey information about the donation (amount, destination, why etc.) transparently to you in our quirky little public database. This doing-good element is key to in our hands cards, we want to have an impact but we are not only optimizing for impact.
- We share our own journey with walking the walk in terms of practicing gratitude, fostering connection, and striving for positive impact. We share the awesome things we are learning and the mistakes we are making on our blog.
- We hold community card-writing sessions.
- Maybe, one day, we will help outstanding charities build and maintain sustainable and equitable relationships with their donors through (in part) awesome cards and other direct mail things that help and don't hurt.
The above is a lot. Let's get started and see how this list changes over time, probably drastically. Here's a few guiding principles:
- Move fast and try new things (relatively) quickly.
- Be transparent.
- Ask for help and feedback, and run experiments.
- Walk the walk, trying and learning from what we suggest.
- Stop things that aren't working.
- Challenge ourselves.
This project is me (Megan) but I am using "we" because anything big takes a village. And it's a project about connection and gratitude which are about being in relationship with others, whether these others are humans or animals or ourselves. So "we" feels fitting. Also I want to be collaborative.
I started this project because I had an excitement and conviction about it that I just couldn't shake. I don't know exactly how this developed, but it's something about the nexus of gratitude, connection, creativity, and savouring that has really drawn me in. There are many people pursuing projects in this space, and these are a deep well of inspiration. It feels inaccurate to pinpoint one thing that has inspired me to start, but I do keep coming back to an excerpt from a book that speaks to the awesome power of giving a meaningful message to someone. From Semi-Rad's Brendan Leonard, in his book Make It:
Some art has a very large audience (like Taylor Swift's), and some art has a very small audience. Sometimes your mom is the is the only person who thinks your crayon drawing is any good. That's OK. Sometimes you write a letter to affect only one person, but if that person is affected in the right way, maybe you get married to that person. That's success, even if a million people don't think you're a great writer.
We're not here to coax marriage out of each recipient of a card we send, duh. But I have some cards on my wall and in my mementos boxes that just get more and more special by the year, and I wonder if you do too.
I also have somewhat of a background in several relevant areas, including: high-impact charitable giving, donor and charity relationship stewardship, card making and card giving. I am a human being that feels relatively disconnected and screen-addicted. I dreaded sending thank-you cards while I was growing up, which is also a credential to put to use for this project. Another is that I still struggle to do it and a personal motivation for this project is to narrow the gap between sending the cards (I actually want to send, not obligation cards) and sending them.