Voting Open for Bloomingfoods Positive Change Program Limestone Post Announcement

Bloomingfoods Co-op Market’s Positive Change program has raised more than $608,000 for local nonprofits since the campaign began in 2016. This community-driven fundraiser is a “register-roundup” program in which shoppers can round up their purchases to the nearest dollar when they pay for their goods at the checkout register. Member-owners of Bloomingfoods vote each year on which organizations will participate. Voting for the 2022 Positive Change recipients has begun.

Each month, an organization is designated as the recipient of that month’s proceeds from Positive Change. Through September this year the program raised more than $107,700.

Limestone Post is honored to be on the ballot for 2022, so if you’re a Bloomingfoods member-owner, and you value what we bring to the community, please consider voting for Limestone Post! Voting continues through October 21. Each Bloomingfoods member-owner gets to vote for 11 of the 38 organizations on the ballot (see below for the complete list of 2022 candidates). Members can click here to vote online. In-store voting is also available.

Recipients for 2021 are Wonderlab Museum of Science, Health & Technology; Farm to Family Fund; Buskirk-Chumley Theater; Hotels for Homeless; Friends of the Monroe County Public Library; Big Brothers and Big Sisters of South Central Indiana; Bloomington Pride; Black Lives Matter Bloomington; Bloomingfoods; Pantry 279; and the Center for Sustainable Living.

While only active member-owners of Bloomingfoods are eligible to vote for next year’s recipients, any Bloomingfoods customer can help a local organization whenever they shop at one of the stores: Bloomingfoods East, 3220 E. Third St., and Bloomingfoods Near West Side, 316 W. Sixth St.

Here’s a reminder of what we do at Limestone Post.

We launched Limestone Post in 2015 as a for-profit publication, but in 2019 we converted to a nonprofit organization, Limestone Media Inc., to join the movement toward nonprofit media. From the beginning, readers have said Limestone Post “fills a gap in the local media landscape” by publishing in-depth, inclusive stories by local freelance writers, photographers, videographers, illustrators, and more.

Our mission as an independent, nonprofit magazine is to publish informative stories about Bloomington and the surrounding areas, with a special focus on public-service and solutions-based journalism. The range of topics we cover — from the arts and outdoors to social-justice issues and more — is as diverse as our community.

In early 2020, our first year as a 501(c)3 organization, we continued our transition to a nonprofit publication. One of our first initiatives was to create a fundraising program designed to pursue operating revenue from three sources: individual donations, grant writing, and business sponsorships/underwriting. However, the pandemic required us, as it did almost every other organization and business, to shift what we were working on — and how. As we continued to publish important articles, we also added new members to our board of directors and welcomed Shayne Laughter as our development director.

Local businesses took a hit in 2020, so we paused our business-underwriting program and donated our “ad space” to nonprofits. We’re pleased that so many organizations took advantage of this free advertising, including Bloomington Academy of Film and Theatre, Monroe County Public Library, Buskirk-Chumley Theater, Sycamore Land Trust, Bloomington Playwrights Project, City of Bloomington Volunteer Network, Visit Bloomington, Cardinal Stage, and WonderLab Museum of Science, Health & Technology. Their free display ads on LP were clicked thousands of times by our readers, sending them to the organizations’ websites to learn more and, hopefully, support them.

Being chosen by Bloomingfoods’ member-owners to participate in the Positive Change program will allow us to keep reporting on the interests and concerns of our community and, especially, to pay our talented, hard-working contributors a fair rate for the exceptional content they create for the community. But we want to wish all of the worthy candidates for Positive Change the best of luck: