BY JACOB “MUFFIN MAN” KAUFMAN
National Muffin Team
What is National Muffin Day? It’s a celebratory holiday created by Jacob Kaufman the Muffin Man of San Francisco (you may have seen him distributing muffins to hungry folks in the Haight, Mission, Civic Center, or Tenderloin) and Julia Levy of Atlanta 5 years ago, in which we encourage the simple-yet-powerful act of direct giving to those most in need. On National Muffin Day, for each person who bakes delicious muffins, gives them to hungry folks in their city, and posts a photo on social media with the hashtag #givemuffins, we will donate $10 to Project Homeless Connect, which provides much-needed services to people experiencing homeless in San Francisco, or Family Promise, a more nationally-focused organization that is geared towards helping homeless families. We also manage to get matches in various amounts from Jacob’s former employer Smithline PC, his current employer Google, his parents and anybody else we can find 🙂 Last year, we ended up raising $14,000 for the two charities!
In past years, we’ve received a lot of positive press, including on CNN, Forbes, and the SF Chronicle. And now, National Muffin Day is growing at such a rate that we can barely keep up! It’s crazy to think that we had just over 70 participants in 2015, when last year we had a whopping 567! We’re having trouble setting a good goal for this year (last year the goal was 300, and we nearly doubled it), so let’s just say that this year our goal is to continue this near-exponential growth.
So what can you do to get involved and get us there? SO, SO MUCH!
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Bake and give on March 1st! Join the Muffin Movement by signing up on our Facebook Event, check out our web page at NationalMuffinDay.org, and follow us on instagram (@natlmuffinday). Bonus: if you participate, you get to tell everybody that you’re a MUFFINTEER!
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Recruit others! Friends, parents, siblings, cousins, OFFSPRING–we want to see them all in aprons and in the streets! For each person who participates, that’s more money for an important cause! Please feel free to forward this email along or invite more peeps to the Facebook event.
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Host a baking party! If you have a decent kitchen and you’re willing to have people over for some fun, please let us know and we can potentially match you up with other bakers. If you are located in San Francisco and want to throw a baking party, please let Jacob know and he will likely reimburse you for ingredients!
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Promote National Muffin Day! Do you use Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? LinkedIn? Tinder? If so, spread some muffin love!
Any other ideas? Any questions? Need muffin recipes or baking tips? Please feel free to email Jacob at jk.babylon@gmail.com.
We hope to hear from you soon and to see your muffin pics on March 1st! Thank you so much!
