How we gave away $63k since 2021

A culture of charitable giving

Putting some of our profit toward causes we care about has always been a priority at garden3d. We phone banked for Bernie in 2019. We matched employee donations to civil rights organizations in 2020. In the earliest months of the pandemic, we organized a monthly virtual trivia where the winner could chose a charity for us to donate to.

We offset our carbon emissions dating back to our founding in 2015, and made direct donations to environmental orgs like the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

In August 2021, we decided to formalize a way of giving back to the community as a company, in order to establish a concrete policy and hold ourselves to standards of cadence and impact.

A small working group, including Flick Eriksson, Angelina Meitzler, and myself, worked to define guidelines and officially kick off a program to distribute company funds to charitable initiatives. In this article, we break down how our Charitable Giving program works and the impact it’s had both within our studio and beyond.

Nomination period

As the end of the year draws near, our Charitable Giving stewards put out a company-wide call for submissions, inviting anyone from the organization to nominate charities and nonprofits for consideration.

This has yielded a diverse and unexpected range of results. Because our team is distributed all over the world, members often have opinions on local initiatives and movements making an impact in their communities. One of our developers, Joseph Thomas, completed the Counselor Training Program at the Southern California Counseling Center and made a great case for their inclusion in our 2022 Giving Package based on his experience there.

Despite our geographical differences, our team is deeply value-aligned. Our egalitarian politics and support for progressive causes often reveal themselves in our selection of charities and nonprofits. And our reactions to world events, like the social justice uprising in 2020, the threat to reproductive rights in America in 2022, and the war in Gaza in 2023, form a common set of values underpinning many of our Charitable Civing choices.

Framework for consideration

We created a framework to consider the charities we support and established guidelines for setting a budget deterministically. Anyone in the company can nominate an organization, and we do our due diligence to research and fact-check aspects of the organization before we make a donation.

We make four key considerations — need, transparency, effectiveness, and alignment with company values.

• Need: We evaluate whether the organization supports a relevant cause and whether they already have large donors. We want our donation to make the most impact for the cause.
• Transparency: We look for a clear mission statement and precise description of what the organization does. The organization’s decision-makers and board members should be openly listed and audited financial statements are readily available.
• Effectiveness: We take a look at their success rates, the depth and breadth of their reach, and the quality of their services.
• Alignment: We consider the cause’s alignment with our company values, as stated in our Story, Philosophy & Vision and Moral Compass documents.

Our annual giving budget is 0.25% of our Gross Revenue, OR 10% of our Reinvestment Budget (calculated at the time of profit share), whichever is greater. As much as this social responsibility is important to us, we are a profit sharing organization, and this ensures our Charitable Giving budget doesn’t affect the value of our profit share units.

Our contributions so far

In 2021, we donated $13,166.11 to four organizations:

1. Heart of Dinner delivers care packages to East Asian elders in need around NYC.
2. Emergent Works trains and employs formerly incarcerated folks in the field of technology.
3. Milwaukee Freedom Fund pays bail for folks who cannot afford to and challenges a system that criminalizes race and poverty.
4. Sunrise Movement advocates political action on climate change.

In 2022, we contributed $31,189.24 to five organizations:

1. Terraset supports high quality carbon removal sustainability projects.
2. Immigrant Social Services focuses its programming on some of the most marginalized in Lower Manhattan.
3. In 2022, we had our company retreat in Puerto Rico. We decided to give back to Taller Salud, a local organization dedicated to improving the well-being of women, with a focus on health as empowerment on the island.
4. Southern California Counseling Center provides affordable mental health services and training programs in SoCal. This organization was recommended by Joseph Thomas, a developer at Sanctuary Computer, who graduated from their Community Counselor Course earlier that year.
5. Leave Room For Thoughts (Campus Complex) grants scholarships for under-resourced individuals to do creative work in NYC.

In 2023, we contributed $18,577.75 to five organizations:

1. The Center for Reproductive Rights ensures that reproductive rights are protected in law as fundamental human rights.
2. Anera has provided medical aid, meals, and supplies to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza in time of crisis.
3. The NYC Environmental Justice Alliance empowers grassroots organizations to improve environmental conditions in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
4. The New York Immigration Coalition works on various issues related to migrants and asylum seekers at a policy level and secures meaningful amounts of funding on behalf of these groups.
5. The Surfrider Foundation is dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans, waves, and beaches.

The impact of a quarter percent

Put simply, we give 25 cents of every $100 we earn to charity. In years when we’ve made less, we’ve given less. But in years like 2022 when we saw our highest profit to date, we were able to give significantly to organizations we believe in.

In reflecting on the journey of our charitable giving program, we’re proud that it has grown into a consistent commitment to making a difference, through an approach that is driven by company ethos and directly impacted by the beliefs of those who work here.

Through these collective efforts and shared values, we've been able to support causes that resonate deeply with us, from environmental conservation to social justice to public health. Each contribution has been our effort towards advocating for a more equitable world.

As the company grows, we are determined to continue expanding the program’s reach and impact. We look forward to carrying on with this spirit of generosity and goodwill in everything that we do, whether it’s Charitable Giving, choosing the clients we take on, or investing in new ventures.