Ten years ago this week, a little girl with the brittlest of bones and the biggest of hearts pushed a button on a mouse that published a never-before-seen WordPress site at chivecharities.org. Crowded around John Resig’s computer, with the Venice Beach Boardwalk in the background and the Pacific Ocean gleaming just beyond, all eyes at this moment were focused on the glowing screen as the page refreshed. Zoe Lush saw a picture of her own face looking back at her. Moments later, she saw the first donation to Chive Charities materialize, followed by thousands more in a matter of mere minutes. The first page of the first chapter in the book of Chive Charities was being written before our eyes.

There’s an essential prologue to the story, however. 

This community was built on a sturdy foundation of positivity and a shared sense of humor. Those two pillars were the soul that drove the growth of this underground community in the early days. When that positivity started to work its way offline in the form of Chive Nation meetups in the thousands, a groundswell of goodwill was building. The 3rd pillar – Humanity – was being born.

Early flash charity stories like the Fluvanna Rescue Squad, Lilli Wilson, and Taylor Morris saw this community rally behind causes we all cared about to the tune of half a million dollars in a year’s time. Impromptu crowdfunding campaigns gave way to a more planned approach and a harnessing of this community’s goodwill efforts through Chive Charities. Humanity became the heart of everything this community stood for. 

At Chive Charities, we aimed to turn the charity model upside down. We introduced you to individuals you couldn’t help but fall in love with. There were firefighters injured outside of their jobs. There were Veterans with debilitating challenges in dire need of a new best friend. There were children with diseases so rare, their conditions were being named after them. In learning their stories, you couldn’t help but care for the greater cause. And through caring, you moved mountains by providing critical and life-giving aid when no one else would step up.

At the center of it all were the donors who made it all possible.

You chipped in $100 for Audrina – whose Maffucci syndrome causes hundreds of benign tumors throughout her body – so she could get a wheelchair-accessible van and renovate her home to be accessible to her needs.

You gave $50 to purchase Gershon an eye-gaze communication device, reliable transportation, and adaptive equipment.

Your selfless donations granted a final wish to a dying Veteran named Justin Fitch, building a retreat for Veterans to reconnect with their families after their service.

In total, you’ve helped us change the lives of 555 Veterans, military families, first responders, and rare medical individuals for nearly $20 million of impact over the past decade. Each recipient is a page in our story, each year is a chapter in our book, and each donor is a footnote in our journey along the way.

So it was only fitting to celebrate our tenth anniversary by doing something special. For years now, we’ve been talking about creating a coffee table book – a book that would house and capture all the moments and testimonies of life-changing and life-giving impact that Chive Charities has made happen with your help. We knew this was the year to create that book.

Get your book RIGHT HERE

This 290-page book took our team months to create. Every individual who has ever been impacted by Chive Charities…they are represented in this book. Every individual and partner who has contributed to Chive Charities to make our work possible – they are a piece of this book. They are in the pages. They are a critical part of our story. There’s a good chance you’re somewhere in these pages, too. 

After hundreds of hours, countless revisions, and more sleepless nights than we’d care to admit, we finally submitted the final proof of this book and sent it off to print. We were relieved, yes. But we also felt a sense of urgency to increase our capacity to do more…to help more people. If we want to advance our work supporting underserved, overlooked causes, we need to grow. If we want to ensure that ten years from now, we’ll be pausing to plan the last year of a 2nd decade of even greater impact, we need more hands and more ink to fill these pages. How do we do that?

We are inviting you to be the ink that prints the next chapter of our story. Help us write it. There are so many blank pages ahead—hundreds of them. And your support is critical to our ability to say YES to more applicants than ever. With this campaign, we are concluding an incredible decade of impact. We have a new decade of opportunity on the horizon. We’d be honored and humbled for you to be a part of it. 

You can’t flip through the pages in this book and not be inspired to make the world at least 10% happier. This isn’t an epilogue. We’re not even close to the climax. We’re simply accelerating into Part 2. And if we’re being honest, the story of Chive Charities is just getting started. But we need YOU!

Help us fill those blank pages.

Get your 10-Year Chive Charities coffee table book by donating at least $150 RIGHT HERE. $150, $250, $500, $1,000…every contribution will help increase our impact. If you’re already a donor, you can expedite the process by first logging in HERE.

Editor’s note: We’ve only got 500 books and then they’re gone forever. First come, first serve. Good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor.