I noticed major issues of racism and xenophobia on social media in early March. These events prompted me to take action and hopefully be able to bring awareness to these issues. I asked my cousin, and she suggested that since I loved to bake, I could possibly host bake sales and donate all the proceeds to various nonprofits fighting against these issues. I knew that to make this idea into a reality, I couldn’t do it by myself so I immediately proposed this idea to my brother, Evan Xie, who attends Drew High School, and my close friends, Kiara Chan and Grace Thwin, who also attend Lowell High School with me. They all loved this idea, especially if our project was focused on hosting virtual bake sales, and donating all proceeds to established organizations fighting for social justice issues, which was an idea that we didn’t see here in San Francisco.
In late June, we launched our Instagram account (@bake.todonate). It took us 3 months to plan everything before we actually announced our first bake sale which shows how much work we put into it. I had various ideas of what we should bake but the first idea that popped up was macarons because that was something we knew how to make and it was a “fancy” item people loved. We ended up advertising our project on all of our social media and our hopes weren’t too high since COVID-19 was still going on. However, in a matter of time, we received numerous customers who wanted to buy from us!
Our first bake sale was a huge success, and we were able to donate $1,000 to the Asian American Advancing Justice, an organization working towards advancing human rights for Asian Americans in hopes that one day, we’re able to create an equal society one day. We were only planning to host one bake sale, but after seeing the promising results, we decided to host another bake sale and decided to support the BLM movement. As a result, we were shown immense support from our community once again. We were fortunate enough to be able to donate $1,050 to the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, an organization fighting for disparities against Black women and girls! Now, all of us realized that this idea was a huge success, so we decided that this was something that we were passionate about.
“I realized that change was not going to implement itself unless we were willing to do something about it,” Olivia Xie said.
From our project, we hope to spread awareness about the social justice issues happening all around us. We want to give youth and even adults a chance to support these amazing causes while either getting some delicious homemade baked goods for themselves or their families.
Since our previous two bake sales, I have gathered more team members as well as volunteers to help us out! In addition, we also created Twitter (@BakeToDonate) and Facebook (Bake ToDonate) accounts to promote our work to a wider audience. We have many new updates, items, and bake sales in-store, so make sure you go follow all of our social media to get them first! We are all extremely grateful to be able to make a difference in our community, and don’t forget to support us in the future!
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. We would love to talk to you guys! Finally, we want to leave everyone with a quote that we love and we hope it inspires everyone reading this, “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” – Howard Zinn.
