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Odell Outreach 2013 Review

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As 2103 comes to a close, here’s a little recap of our charitable efforts!

Charity of the Month program: Our charitable committee selects 2 great organizations for our charities of the month. Each organization receives a grant and the opportunity to share more about what they do in our Tap Room. We also select another organization that receives our guests’ generous tips. Here’s a recap of this year’s recipients…

90 Angel

January Tips: ELTC Circles

 

February Tips: Urban Peak Colorado Springs

March Tips: Cattleman’s Land Trust

April Tips: S.T.R.I.D.E. Learning Center

May Tips: Growing Project

June Tips: Project Self-Sufficiency

July Tips: Volunteers of America

August Tips: Juvenile Diabetes

September Tips: Sustainable Living Association

  • High Park Restoration Coalition (Fort Collins)
  • Earthlinks (Denver)

October Tips: Colorado Water Trust

November Tips: Food Bank for Larimer County (turkey dinners!)

December Tips: Project Self-Sufficiency (holiday gifts)

As you can see, they were diverse and we worked hard to represent all three of our giving parameters, Human Services (specifically at-risk youth and the elderly), Education and Sustainability.

Our tip jar program is highly successful due to the amazing generosity of our guests. We are able to allocate $2,400 on average at the end of each month to the designated charity on the jar.

Volunteer…

Odell-OutreachOdell Outreach has been a great practice for us in engaging our co-workers and fans in some of the community work that we do outside the brewery. In the spring we take part in and invite our fans to join us for, National Volunteer Month. We have had great success partnering with the United Way and their partner agencies to make sure that our efforts will not be in vain. We had a group go out to a local historical landmark, the old water works for yard work and general “sprucing up.” We had a second group go out to the new facility for the Center for Family Outreach and paint the indoors to make it more inviting. It was a great day and the kids even made us lunch!

 

We also help engage with Make A Difference Day in the fall. This year we partnered with La Familia (The Family Center) to make their fall harvest celebration a success. We had another group head over to the Northern Colorado Aids Project helping them make their facility more inviting and less clinical.

This year our co-worker Team Build was done in tandem with one of the biggest projects we have taken part in this year, The House That Beer Built. HTBB is a project that we put together with our local Habitat for Humanity chapter and engaged our industry colleagues to join us in helping to rebuild a home for a family that was victim to the High Park Fire. 8 of our local breweries came together to raise the $100,000 that it takes to build a Habitat house and to fill the sweat-equity hours. We were able to get the family into their home this week (before the holidays!!) and celebrate their dedication. We are still about $13,000 shy of our $100,000  goal and are looking forward to an event at the Moot House this coming January to raise the balance. This incredible collaboration speaks to our wonderful, inclusive industry and our collective dedication to our community!

Events…

Throughout the year we donate thousands of gallons of beer and loads of merchandise to help ensure the success of fundraising events for hundreds of non-profits in our distribution area. Fort Collins Read Aloud served our beer after The Dead Celeb race right before Halloween, Trees Water People served our beer at their annual Stove Party, and we were the featured beer for Turning Point’s Zombie Crawl again this year just to name a few. We look forward to being the beer sponsor for the Book Trust’s Books On Tape event in the Agave Room on January 23rd, 2014.

We also host events here at the brewery for local non-profits. Some are fundraisers, some are staff and volunteer appreciation nights and some are educational, like our monthly NCRES meetings, the 3rd Tuesday of each month. We just held a fundraiser for Save the Poudre and the FoCo Café was here last week to generate and celebrate donations to their cause on Colorado Gives Day. We celebrated Winter Bike to Work day with free pints for riders, a raffle for the Bike Library and live music.

New in 2013…

This year we tried a couple new programs that generated great results! The first was a collaborative effort created by one of our hop providers in the Willamette Valley. They provided us product, hops and malt, and we turned into a delicious brew and donated the profits (to the tune of $5,000!) to Ales for ALS!

We were also approached by a research associate from CSU who works with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program on campus. He presented to us a beautiful little butterfly named the “Hops Blue” or “Celastrina,” that happens to make its habitat on wild hops that grow in riparian areas unique to Colorado. We crafted a delicious Saison to compliment this fun story and committed $1 from each bottle sold. We were able to raise $12,000 for the Colorado Natural Heritage Program and celebrated with them 2 weeks ago on Giving Tuesday!

Happy holidays to all, cheers to 2014 and all that we can accomplish together!

– Karla

PS: If you are interested in learning more about Odell Outreach or would like to volunteer with us, please visit our philanthropy page or join our Facebook group.

_MG_0378 Karla is originally from Pittsburgh, PA. She graduated from CSU 10 years ago and made Fort Collins her home. She has been given the extraordinary opportunity to work at making it a better place through her employment as Community Outreach Coordinator at Odell Brewing Company.