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I would like to nominate St. Croix Chocolate Company. Although our small business is hardly corporate with just $350,000 in annual revenue and six employees – and located in a village of 679 people-- we see our small size as an advantage to help magnify the positive effects we can have. In short, to us, it’s personal.
Since our founding in 2010, we have initiated and hosted numerous free events for our local community, cleaned up the highway right of way, sponsored a girls' running team, worked with dozens of artists to promote their work, and donated our product – fine chocolate -- to literally thousands of fundraisers. This year we took our community engagement even further.
When we read that our state, Minnesota, had welcomed the second-most Ukrainian war refugees in the U.S., St. Croix Chocolate Company owners and staff wanted to make a personal connection.
We reached out to Alight, a non-profit organization that connects refugee families with sponsor families who assist with housing, employment and paperwork. We offered to open our shop and guide families in our specialty: hand-decorating chocolate eggs and molding chocolate bunnies, which we sent home with them, free of charge.
We welcomed several Ukrainian families and their sponsor families over four class sessions. Although it was a very busy production/retail time of year for us as we were heading into Easter and Spring, we agreed it was important to reach as many families as possible.
Alight scheduled the families, got them transportation to our shop and provided a translator. Our staff learned how to say "Welcome" in Ukrainian, and showed everyone how to use edible, colored cocoa butter to decorate molds, which they then filled with chocolate. We guided everyone as they filled silicone molds of bunnies and hamsters with liquid chocolate
To kids, painting with cocoa butter is like finger painting, and even the youngest child excelled at self expression. A little Ukrainian girl stopped crying and started using foam stamps with the colors. Her older sister eagerly tried her hand molding bunnies and even using chocolate to “glue” the eggs together. A little boy, in the U.S. for just six weeks, pointed to the bright chocolate eggs and said in English all the colors he saw. Parents smiled as they decorated their own eggs with Ukrainian flag colors and flowers. Our staff showed everyone how to remove their critters from the molds, and everyone cheered and high-fived. By the time we packed up their chocolate creations for them to take home two hours later, we knew them not as refugees, but as fathers and mothers, auto mechanics,
Our staff stepped a little out of their comfort zone to share our passion, and I'm proud we were able to do this. But even more, I'm grateful these families were willing to give us the gift of trusting us to share chocolate with them. What we did is a small, good thing. What they did was a big thing.
Nomination Title: St. Croix Chocolate Company -- A small, good thing
