Cards’ Proceeds Go Toward Good Cause

UNICEF is the granddaddy of cards for a cause, raising close to $500 million through the sale of its greeting cards since the program started in 1949, according to Nancy Sharp-Zickerman of thS. Committee for UNICEF. Now more and more cards indicate that some of the proceeds will go to a good cause.

Send Inc., a Philadelphia company that offers some of the year’s best retro cards, contributes part of its sales to organizations that benefit homeless children. One of Send’s cards is a color photo of a row of 1950s-style snowman candles and a little-girl-in-a-parka candle against a background of metallic-looking snowflakes. Pomegranate Publications of Rohnert Park, Calif., publishes Environmental Defense Fund holiday cards, which feature color photographs of harp seal pups, flamingos, Japanese cranes, Mount Rainier and the like. The sale of the cards helps support EDF’s work.

AZ You Like It Cards of Washington also provides a portion of the sales proceeds to conservation groups. The cards feature green and red ink drawings of outdoor hiking gear, a lantern hanging from a pine tree, and other outdoor scenes.

Cards from Janeen Koconis of Koco, N.Y., help support the Hunger Project. Her cutting-edge cards incorporate text in designs that would lift even Ebenezer Scrooge’s spirits.

Packages of cards featuring artist Marysa Dockerys’ “Street Sleepers,” a primitive painting by the former shelter resident of homeless people huddled in makeshift shelters under city lights on a snowy night, are being sold by Washington area retailers for the Calvary Women’s Shelter. Sales benefit the shelter’s Homeless Artist Guild.

EthnoGraphics of Santa Barbara, Calif., donates money to, among others, the United Negro College Fund from sales of cards in its African American Collection; the American Indian Graduate Center, from sales of cards in its Native American Collection; and a Hispanic scholarship fund, from sales of cards in its Mexican American Collection. Hallmark Cards paid Harlem Textile Works a licensing fee to use its designs in a Kwanzaa card line this year. Harlem Textile Works is a 9-year-old program of the Children’s Art Carnival, a nonprofit art school that offers free workshops taught by professional artists.

Not all card manufacturers mention their charitable works on their cards. Suzy Becker, author-illustrator of “All I Know I Learned From My Cat,” White House Fellow and owner of the Widget Factory of Concord, Mass., which produces her cards, uses a percentage of the Factory’s profits as seed money for charitable projects. Every other year, the Widget Factory sponsors Ridefar, a five-day, 500-mile bike Ride for AIDS Resources. This year $64,000 from the event was donated to the Names Project, the Children’s AIDS Program and 25 community-based AIDS programs.