Knotty Boy Monthly Charity Focus

- March 1, 2008, 8pm -
Knotty-Oke and All-Ages Metal Show
for
ChariTree
A Vancouver non-profit that creates and supports tree planting projects benefiting underprivlidged kids.

Get down to Hoko’s Sushi and Karaoke Bar in Vancouver on Saturday March 1 st to gorge on sushi, check out melt-your-face-off metal band The Scorched Earth Policy from Oakland, CA, and seize the opportunity to bribe, by any donation over $1, willing and unwilling Knotty Staff to loudly sing Celine Dion and Meatloaf karaoke songs of your choice in public. We might even let YOU sing if you don’t laugh too much at us. Or make a large contribution. Otherwise rowdy Knotty staff is guaranteed to bogart the mic, as per usual.

Used Cell Phone Drop-Box
Now at Knotty Boy Lock Shop & Salon
for Global Peace Containers!

One of Knotty Boy's favorite charities is GLOBAL PEACE CONTAINERS (http://www.gbs.gpc.com/), a not-for-profit organization that economically converts old shipping containers into sustainable housing and community buildings such as medical facilities, schools and neighborhood centers! Isn't that amazing? Knotty Boy is so excited about contributing to this organization that we have set up a drop-box for collecting old cell phones at the Knotty Boy Lock Shop & Salon, which we will return for donations for GPC. Most of us have at least one old, unused cell phone lying around and its NOT eco-friendly to toss it out, so bring (or mail) them on into the Shop anytime Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm. You can help us out further by sending an email around to friends and family, posting it on your Facebook or MySpace and see how many you can bring in! Thanks, guys! Weee! Giving is fun!

The official Knotty Boy Child-Sponsorship Fundraiser!

UPDATE June 2007 - We are now shipping out ALL orders in eco-friendly shipping materials, and for free!! Read on for more about this good news!

Back in November 2005, Knotty Boy decided to embark upon a sort of non-conventional fund-raising adventure, where we began combining one good thing we were already doing - child sponsorship in under-developed countries - with a NEW good thing - making eco-friendly packaging an option for customers! All good things. So, for $1 extra, you could choose to have your order packed in a cardboard box filled with biodegradable foam bits made out of corn starch that dissolved in water, just like the Wicked Witch of the West (rather than the standard bubble-mailer or Styrofoam packing bits). To our utter surprise, over 30% of you green-conscious customers decided it was definitely worth the $1 for the fun of seeing the packing material fizzle up and go down your sink. BUT what really sold you on the whole thing was the fact that when you chose this option, $. 50 of that $1 also went directly toward sponsoring a new child in need.

Before beginning this special fund-raiser, Knotty Boy already sponsored seven little ones from all over the world, and we still continue to support them year after year with the proceeds from each order you normally place with us. However, we really wanted to do more, faster, and you totally stepped in to help!

In just over one year (Nov ’05 – Feb. ’07), your donations, $.50 at a time, allowed us to sponsor a total of five more underprivileged kids around the world, at a rate of one child every three months (see their profiles below). Again, this was a total of 30% of our Knotty family making this small donation with every order placed on our website. Do you know how huge that is?? If we here at Knotty Boy have learned anything from all of this, it’s that it is so easy to make choices in this world that don’t cost us a lot, but that directly impact the lives of others so that they can grow up and hopefully have the same opportunities to change things in their worlds, too. Exciting!

Now, even MORE exciting is this little fact: As of June 2007, our genius Warehouse Manager, Michael, found a source of eco-friendly packing materials that is the same price as what we were paying for the nasty land-filler packaging! Et voila, we are now packing ALL orders we send out in eco-friendly packaging, at no extra cost to you. Can you even stand it? Our ‘environmental footprint’ just got even smaller now that we are no longer sending out ANYTHING packed in Styrofoam or plastic bubble-mailers, trading those for new paper-filled mailers and cardboard boxes with the corn-starch packing bits that fizzle up in water. Wahoo!

So NOW, when you choose the $1 extra option upon check-out, 100% of your $1 is going toward the sponsorship of a needy child in a developing country with a year’s worth of food, clothing and schooling they otherwise would not have had. (Heck, we’ll even throw in a little Knotty Boy mystery gift for FREE, just to say ‘thank you’ for your contribution.) If 30% of you still choose this option, that simply means we’re going to be adding twice as many kids to our little sponsored family than we were before, twice as fast. How can you not love that? It simply rocks the spot, kids.

Thank you so much for coming along with us on these efforts, and helping make it even easier for us to be an ethical company, dedicated to what we like to call ‘purpose beyond profits’. *beam!* We love you!!

Knotty Heart-o-Meter

In order to show you how close we are getting to each of our new child sponsorship goals, our esteemed graphic-designer Jerome has made us this adorable Knotty Heart-o-Meter.

Click on the Knotty Boy’s heart to see how far along we are in re-sponsoring little Estefany de Almeida of Brazil!

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July 07 update

As of March 15, 07, we began contributing the funds (your FULL $1 contribution, now that we are sending all orders out eco-friendly at no extra cost!) received to re-sponsor each of our 5 new little ones for their next two year's needs. The other seven children in our original Sponsored Child family that we've sponsored since 1998 continue to be supported by a percentage of customer order proceeds.

As of July 19, aready we have received enough to re-sponsor little Kandia Tripura of Bangladesh and our eighth child in total, until March 2009. Hooray!

Next, we will keep you updated when our goals are met for re-sponsoring
our adorable Estefany de Almeida of Brazil.

The sooner these kids next two years' sponsorship needs are refilled, the sooner we can move on to sponsoring new children in need, so thank you SO much for your continued contributions, Knotty kids!

December 06 – March 07

Wow! Thank you, all, for contributing in another three short months what was needed to sponsor our twelfth child in total, who’s heartbreaking story makes us even more happy to be able to help, if that were even possible. Meet Justino Choque Buendia from Bolivia here!

September 06 - December 06:
That’s right, as of December 25, 2006 – in fact, early Christmas morning, to our absolute delight - enough funds were collected to add yet ANOTHER child to our sponsorship effort. We are so pleased to introduce 15-year-old Daniel Sathiyawell from Sri Lanka to our growing family - now a grand total of eleven!

June 06 - September 06:
And you’ve gone and done it AGAIN, you Knotty kids!! Thanks to your extra $1 contributions upon checkout from our website, meet our most recently sponsored cutie, little 4 ½ year old Indhumathy Murugan from India. As of September 19, Indhu makes our tenth sponsored child in our little Knotty family. You guys have directly impacted Indhumanthy’s life by helping to provide her with a year’s worth of food, clothing and schooling she otherwise would not have had. Thank you so much for your continued donations!

February 06 – June 06:
You did it again! Meet 2 year old Larissa Ariane Seares de Abreu from Brazil, sponsored child #2 as a direct result of your donations through this fundraiser, and ninth child in total that Knotty Boy sponsors. The goal was met for Larissa on June 7th, so now as of August 22 we again have over half of what is needed to sponsor a third child for a year. Weird, we’re starting to notice a 3.5 - 4 month trend here… very interesting… Knotty Boy Sponsorship Project/bizarre social experiment? Good golly, what more could you ask for from a website! Huzzah!

Update November 05 - February 06:
We did it! Since we began this initiative in November 05, you Knotty kids have contributed - $.50 at a time - enough to sponsor a new child for one year through this eco-packing fund raiser! Meet Kandia Tripura, our eighth child in total that we currently sponsor yearly. Kandia will be 8 years old on May 20th, 2006. He, his one brother and two sisters live in Bangladesh. His father works in the fields and his mother cares for the large family at home, which is a bamboo hut with sadly very little land surrounding them to cultivate. Kandia is in Kindergarten this year thanks to your donations! He likes to study, enjoys reading stories, and his favorite subject is math. He’s our newest sponsored child and we’re very happy for the opportunity to help him and his family in this way.

Since the goal for Kandia was actually met on February 15th, as of April 15 we have now collected again over half of what is needed for child #2 through this effort. Your generosity is making a difference to both the environment by choosing better packing materials for your orders, and is also directly impacting the quality of a child’s life out there.

We will continue to add the profiles of each new child here, so keep checking back to see exactly how your 100 pennies are going toward not one, but two very important efforts that are being made toward relieving suffering on this planet. Thank you to everyone that has donated so far!

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Toronto Naturals 4th Annual Hair and Beauty Show
May 27, 2007

When contacted by Toronto Naturals for sponsorship of this year's event, we agreed that the most impactful way we could contribute would be by donating 100 of our reusable, natural-cotton Knotty Boy Kit Bags to use for the event's gift bags - rather than using the standard plastic. Find out more about Toronto Naturals Hair and Beauty Show here. We love that this show is dedicated to the promotion of chemical-free styles and products for heavily-textured and Afro hair types!

Oakland Park School Playground Project
Streator, Illinois

Check this out! One fine morning in Sept. 2006, KnottyBrianna received an email at the DreadQuarters in regards to making a contribution to a raffle for this school’s upcoming fundraiser in December. We checked it out and definitely are behind what they are doing down there to help physically-challenged children have fun in their community.

So, in response, we have sent them Knotty Boy product and stickers to distribute to help make their event fun and draw a bighearted crowd. This illustration shows the playground that they are working so hard for. As you can see, there are no stairs on this playground – only ramps, making it easy for all children to play together regardless of ability.

And here is an overview of the project from Amy Goodrich, the school’s PTO President –

“This year we are we are working together to enhance our traditional 20 year old playground equipment to include access and usability for all children in our community. We have many children who because of disability limitations are not able to access our equipment or any other playground equipment in our community and must stay in their wheelchairs on the sideline watching the other children at play. The number of children with limitation has been steadily rising. We would like our project to benefit children with and without disabilities by providing opportunities for all children to play together side by side.

The playground that we are working towards is called a "Boundless Playground" and it will cost over $45,000 (as much as a home in our town). Our PTO has raised less than half the funds needed over the past two years that we have been fundraising for this project, we know that we will get this done but we need the help of others. Our school is around 80% low-income, so where we lack funds, we make up for in community spirit!

A wheelchair useable playground is different from a playground that is ADA accessible. Accessible means the child will have to get out of the wheelchair in order to play, useable means they can stay in their wheelchair and play along with their peers. This playground will be different from your typical playground; this playground will be built with ramps instead of stairs so everyone regardless of ability will be able to play together, comfortably without getting out of their wheelchairs. The nearest useable playground is over an hour’s drive from our town. This will be one of 5 public wheelchair useable playgrounds in Illinois.

If you have any questions or have additional information that can help us reach our goal, or if you would like to make a donation of cash or products for our upcoming raffles, feel free to call, email or send any information to:

Oakland Park School

c/o Amy Goodrich, k-5 PTO President
701 S. Sterling St
Streator IL 61364
goodrich63@verizon.net
(815)672-9460

Here is crossing our fingers that others will be willing to help!”

If you feel moved to donate either hand-made products or funds, please follow your heart and send what you can to help these kids, Knotty ones!

Knotty Boy Warehouse Eco-Action

Down at the Knotty Boy Warehouse (or Zee Varhaus as we like to call it), next-to-all cardboard and paper is recycled, and what we can’t use, we give away as packing material and moving boxes to others. The Warehouse actually only generates less than one green garbage bag of non-recyclable garbage every two weeks!! Wherever we can, packing materials from shipments sent to us are also used for sending KB products back out to you kids. So if your order arrives in a box that looks like it’s been used for something else – surprise, it probably was! (Or... it WAS really run over by a truck, or both if you’re extra lucky.)

And if we may boast a little more on behalf of Knotty Boy, we have also been awarded a Certificate of Diversion congratulating us on all the recycling that we do here at the DreadQuarters. In 2005 we managed to divert 12 cubit yards (or 6 pickups-full), and in 2006 it was almost double - 22 cu. yards and 11 pickups-full! Heck, how about a picture of 'em for your viewing pleasure…

All this to say, we’re attempting to use our noggins to make changes along the golden path of conscious consumerism. Check out our Knotty Boy Vision and Values page if you haven’t before, to see more on what this is all about for us. We’re excited to be finding better ways of doing things, and wanted to let you know all the good planet-happy Knotty news. YAY us!!!

Dreads for Wishes

On March 26, 2006 Knotty Boy Lock Shop and Salon helped Knotty Kalen Stevens-Heap ‘sell’ and cut her locks to raise funds for The Children’s Wish Foundation, in memory of a friend who passed away from cancer at age 15. Read all about it, and watch the movie here!

And here's a letter from The Children's Wish Foundation that we recieved after Kalen's big day:

Knotty Boy now on MySpace and facebook!

Get to know the rest of your Knotty family on MySpace here!

Search and join the 'Knotty Boy Lock Shop and Salon' Group on Facebook and see the latest on what our Knotty Stylist Dream-Team is up to!