{Open Letter to BCG Supporters} Thank You for One Year of BCG!

Greetings Friends and Supporters of BCG!

A little over a year ago, I decided that I would be the change I wanted to see. I’ll never forget  one of my deciding moments to start BCG; I was reading a blog and I remember seeing a post that read “Monica attends a charity event and her shoes are amazing.” As a woman and no doubt a shoe and charity lover, I clicked to read the full story hoping to see some information about the charity Monica was supporting and there was nothing, just 2-3 screen shots of her shoes. I thought to myself what a teaching moment that was, this site has hundreds of thousands of viewers and if even they had mentioned the charity or the cause once there would have been  hundreds of thousands of people who could have been educated about the cause. I later found out the event was for Feed the Children; a cause that is so close to my heart, because I know that on any given night there are nearly 650,000 homeless people in the united states and approximately 150,000 are kids and teens, often who are eating just 3-5 times a week. I knew there was a void to be filled.

I knew I had to so something and that’s when BCG was birthed. I wanted to create a website that was always positive, that highlighted black people doing phenomenal things people to impact our communities, shined light on black celebrity phillantrophy and most importantly was all about giving. To be where we are today a year later, is truly a blessing. I can remember for the first month of BCG we had less than 30 likes on Facebook and maybe 100 followers on Twitter and to in one year to have amassed a social media following of nearly 50,000 people, all I can is look at GOD.

Since our inception we have featured over 300 nonprofit organizations and donated more than $20,000 to nonprofits and causes.

In January we launched the BCG Awards and honored people and organizations in more than 11 categories who gave back, just last month we held the Black Man Can Awards where we highlighted 60 men and boys around the country who are actively promoting the positive black male image. We hosted a diaper drive for Haiti where we were able to provide enough diapers to two orphanages for six months, in  the spring we held a book drive to support summer reading among youth and donated more than 3,000 books to organizations across the country and currently we’re hosting a toiletry drive with the Neo-soul artist Kem where we hope to help 10,000 homeless individuals with care packages this fall. The celebrity support has been amazing, we’ve hosted twitter chats and events with Holly Robinson Peete, Jill Scott and B.O.B. to name a few and have supporters including: Ludacris, Lupe Fiasco, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Soledad O’brien. I’d  like to say that we’ve been busy, but what I love most is that through our daily Black and Missing spotlights we have reunited 7 missing people, 4 children with their loved ones and that means the world to me. I don’t know how many of you have children, but imagine that your child goes missing and through our posts and tweets they are found, that is so powerful and for that fact alone, I know that I will never stop what we do with BCG!!!

I’d like to continue to ask for your support, tell someone about BCG, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and all of the social networks you use. Visit the site regularly and make a commitment to give back whenever you can, however you can. Never make the mistake of doing nothing because you can only do little because every little bit counts!

~ Jasmine Crowe; Founder of BlackCelebrityGiving.com