Kindness Matters
“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,”
Ever since Community Automotive Repair’s inception, this company has been built (literally) on charitable initiatives. If you know our back story, it’s not something we’ve intentionally promoted to date. This is in large part due to the Biblical verse cited above. Now, any of you that have been around for awhile also know that we’re people of faith, but just the same it’s not been something we openly advertise. We believe our actions should speak for themselves but then there’s that slight rub that says people of faith shouldn’t hide behind their beliefs. All this to say, we’re not interested in being forceful about our morals or values, but we’re happy to share them with people that may inquire. Being in business requires you/us to operate within ethical guidelines that dictate what level of transparency we may have in regards to our own personal beliefs. It’s unfortunate to a degree, but painfully accurate.
To that end, we’ve almost never made a point to call attention to good works in which we may be involved. We’ve engaged with local and regional endeavors in secret, for the most part. However, that was then, and as Bob Dylan prophetically spoke years ago… the times, they are a changin’! While we maintain it’s not our desire to shamelessly broadcast our philanthropic arm, we do believe there’s merit in partnering with you to maximize the benefit of these offerings. How else would you be able to engage unless you were aware on some level? In short, you wouldn’t.
As we’ve observed a significant percentage of our local friends launching their own charitable campaigns, we mostly (up to this point) have stood quietly along the sidelines. We’ve had to discern our place in the fold, and that hasn’t been easy. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been this difficult, but we submit it likely was because of our steadfast wrestling with being a sustainable and profitable local business, as opposed to building our legacy in private. Suffice to say, our decision to be either of these entities was not made sheepishly or without laboring over the most appropriate way to do so.
Today, we’re happy to introduce you to three specific relationships we’ve had, in hopes (should you be willing and able) you may come alongside our efforts and help make an even bigger impact for these benefactors. By design, we’ve given of our time, energy, or resources to benefit the following local organizations:
ICCF (Inner City Christian Federation) – providing affordable (and in some cases emergency) housing to those in need, learn more at www.iccf.org
Kids’ Food Basket – attacking childhood hunger in West Michigan by providing sack suppers and empowering kids to help each other through educational programming, learn more at www.kidsfoodbasket.org
Congress Plus – an afterschool (latch-key type) program within our neighbor Congress Elementary School’s campus, specifically designed to help local kids achieve greater leadership through elevated liberal arts programming. Currently Congress Plus doesn’t have much of an online presence, but more information about Congress Elementary School is available at www.grpublicschools.org/congress
We launched Kindness Matters infrastructure last year to better manage our continued support of these fine groups. With that, our hope is to slowly release campaigns on site that promote different levels of engagement, in which you will be able to participate as little or as much as you’re able. We hope arriving at this place of more public disclosure doesn’t misconstrue our sincere mission to assist these wonderful people without drawing attention to ourselves. This isn’t about us, and we can’t express explicitly enough how the desire of our heart is that these organizations would receive the spotlight they both need and deserve. It has been our deep pleasure to help where we’re able, and we’re even more eager to make a greater impact with your help.
We anticipate early 2nd quarter will introduce some opportunities for you to get involved, should you be interested. For example, services rendered at our place of business may include some credits to grow our donation, which in turn would become OUR collective gift. Doing this alone all these years hasn’t been an exercise in futility, just that now we believe the power and influence of many can (and likely will) make an exponential difference.
Thank you for ongoing trust and confidence. We don’t take the opportunity to serve you lightly, and greatly appreciate you choosing our local small business to address all your automotive service/repair needs.
Lastly, the aforementioned website upgrade is almost complete, and we hope to have a more user friendly and technologically advanced (read as quicker) space on the internet by the end of this month.
Kindness matters, friends… and so do you.
CAR