The year 2020 has brought us tremendous opportunity to reflect, learn, and act. BLACK LIVES MATTER. Today and every day I stand in solidarity in the fight for justice, and an end to systemic racism, police brutality, and violence against black lives. Burke's core has always been centered around community, awareness, representation and creating a space for independent, creative change-makers. I will continue to do the work to do better at making this true.
As a female small business owner, I believe in transparency and accountability and have worked to share openly with all of you about my environmental efforts and inclusivity goals. These are goals that will be ever growing and expanding and therefore never fully reached, but in an effort to continue this transparency, I also want to offer the following as a source for accountability for myself and for my business.

• I support the 15 percent pledge created by Aurora James asking major retailers to commit to buying 15% of their products from Black owned businesses to match the 15% population. I am not a major retailer, but I have decided to also dedicate 15% of my shelf space to Black brands, designers and/or artists, and will work to achieve this goal by the end of the year. Burke is driven by sustainability and modern, contemporary design, and I know there are Black artists that are underrepresented in this space, so I will be seeking out those that inspire me in these ideals and that align with the store's vision and values.
• If you are unfamiliar with our Burke Residency, it is a program featuring pop-up collections from one designer and one artist which rotates every 3 months. Our program is coming up on its one year anniversary in August, and so far 4 of our 7 residencies have featured POC with 2 of them being black female artists. Going forward, I am dedicating at least 5 of the 8 residency slots per year to BIPOC. I will be working to add an application submission form for program participation to the website soon (if any web folks can assist with this please reach out to me!). 
• You can visit our page here to see some of the organizations we've donated to since starting the business in 2017, and we will continue to center organizations focused on education, civil rights, and social justice with future donations. 

If you have followed along with me for a while, I hope you feel that I've tried to do my part to give back and show up, knowing I still have endless work to do. I've focused many of my efforts around the conversation of sustainability in terms of climate change and the environment, and I recognize that equal attention should be paid to ending racism. I will leave you with this article which I encourage you to read, written by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, explaining how racism itself derails our efforts to save the planet. 
As always, my inbox is open for any and all dialogue and feedback!
So much love to all of you, always. 
-Maggie

 

WAYS TO CONTINUE

 

WHAT TO DO

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh6reFJWkZRGBL5iIezTfA2tkKBB3X9JcMh2QYT8tWk/mobilebasic

 

WAYS TO HELP

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/

 

BLACK HISTORY LIBRARY

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13Liu5aTBEdqqqntfOyAgK9IH5sfMwM4ZE1wlSE5IJUw/mobilebasic

 

BLACK-OWNED BUSINESSES TO SUPPORT

https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/support-black-owned-businesses/