He rained down manna for the people to eat, He gave them the grain of heaven. Psalm 78:2
HeavenScent Manna provides baked goods to homeless shelters. We established this site to help others support HeavenScent Manna’s mission through donations. Read more in the About Us area. If you feel led to support our mission, please donate.
Recently, HeavenScent Manna Bakery partnered with Grandma’s Comfort (http://grandmascomfort.org/) to provide all natural baked goods monthly for birthday parties at the Lansing City Rescue Mission Family Center and Men’s Transformational Center. If you would like to support this mission, you can donate to HeavenScent Manna directly on the Donate page or you can donate to Grandma’s Comfort, a 501(c)3 organization, to receive a tax benefit for your donation (http://grandmascomfort.org/Donations.html). This endeavor requires $30/month to cover the costs of the ingredients. We look forward to the opportunity to expand HeavenScent Manna Bakery’s mission with Grandma’s Comfort.
Well, it has been a transitional year for us! With the Lansing City Rescue Mission’s Family Center’s move to their new facility on S. Cedar, we were unable to continue to deliver baked goods until we started operating from a certified kitchen. So, while waiting to see what other opportunities we had available, we worked on transitioning from an LLC to a non-profit corporation. We successfully made that change toward the end of summer. Even though we are still working on obtaining 501(c)(3) charitable organization, donations are currently tax deductible for donors under current IRS regulations since we fall below a certain level of revenue. Thank you to Becky Cienki who has volunteered to complete all the paperwork to get us our IRS 501(c)(3) designation! We hope to have that official status in 2011.
Another big change this summer occurred. Letticia and her family moved to Rochester, MN. Christine is running all the baking activities in Lansing, MI. She is supported by her fiance Mark. We are blessed to have a certified kitchen available at Church in the City where Mark is an associate pastor. With this certified kitchen, we hope to start baking for the Lansing City Rescue Mission’s Family Center once again (once Christine gets ServSafe certified). The certification test is a couple hundred dollars; if you would like to donate specifically to support this cost, please let us know. Letticia is actively looking for opportunities to expand the scope of HeavenScent Manna Bakery’s services to organizations in Rochester, MN.
During the summer we also had additional opportunities open up. We now provide our high-quality all-natural baked goods to Ele’s Place, Advent House, and A New Beginning Pregnancy Center. We hope to increase the frequency of our deliveries once we get through this transitional period.
We also want to thank Sherry Dunn who hosted a fundraiser on behalf of HeavenScent Manna Bakery. Please contact Sherry if you are interested in supporting a fund raising activity (or participating one) for HeavenScent Manna! sherrysilver1919@comcast.net
As we come to a close of another year, we want to take this opportunity to give thanks to all of you who support HeavenScent Manna Bakery in various ways! All that we are able to do is because God has brought all of you into our lives to support this mission to reach out to others in need. May our great God bless you abundantly as you have blessed us.
MERRY CHRISTMAS & MAY YOUR 2011 BE BLESSED
In the midst of re-organizing as a non-profit corporation with support from the Michigan State University Small Business and Non-Profit Clinic, we have been busy lining up more shelters to support. Starting today, we began baking for one of the two new shelters.
Today, we baked and delivered goodies to the Advent House in Lansing. We provide high-quality all natural buttermilk blueberry muffins and oatmeal raisin cookies. It was nice to be baking again!
We also have the A New Beginning Pregnancy Services in Charlotte, MI on our customer list. We will be delivering to them next week. We are currently communicating with another shelter to setup services.
On June 7th, we raised some funds by providing baked goods to a disaster exercise hosted at Ingham Regional Medical Center and hosted by Comprehensive Emergency Management Associates. These opportunities not only provide a means to raise funds to support the HeavenScent Manna mission, but also raises awareness of our mission to raise additional support. If you have activities that need baked goods, would like to support our community mission by having us cater to your activity, please contact us at info@heavenscentmanna.com. Thank you!
To Letticia for successfully passing the ServSafe exam! Christine plans to take the test in the near future.
In this transition period, we working to put together a cookbook of recipes from the previous year. Our goal is to sale the cookbook as a means to raise funding to support HeavenScent Manna Bakery’s mission. The cookbook will include about 75 recipes! We will let you know when we get it done!
Praise God for the City Rescue Mission’s Women and Children Center recent move to their new facility at the former Maplewood Elementary School building on S. Cedar. This will be a great improvement for occupants. Still, with the move to the new facility brings some challenges for HeavenScent Manna’s ability to provide support. Because of the new move we are required to cook out of a certified kitchen and have certified bakers in order to provide baked goods. So, we will not be able to continue to support this facility in the immediate future. During this transitional time we will focus on setting a foundation for HeavenScent Manna to be able to sustain support to that shelter and other shelters for the long-term. Some activities we will focus on in the upcoming months include:
- Our bakers will get ServSafe certified
- We will transition the business structure to a non-profit corporation (Thank to those of you who have identified interest in being a board member.)
- We will apply for 501(c)3 status.
- We will put together a cookbook with HeavenScent Manna Bakery recipes. We plan to use proceeds from the cookbooks to support funding needs.
- We will put together a strategy for achieving long-term sustainability.
Thank you for all of you who partnered with us so far! We will keep you updated as we move forward.
Today was a great baking day. We were extra busy this week with baking for Grandma’s Comfort and the Rescue Mission’s Family Center. For Grandma’s Comfort we made frosted brownies. For the Family Center we made graham streusel coffee cake and chocolate chip cookies. Amanda volunteered today to help us with our extra work. Thanks for the extra help today Amanda!!
Later this week, we will be baking for a CEMA training program this Thursday. We also provided baked goods for a training program that CEMA conducted on February 19th. These are other opportunities for us to raise funds for the Family Center. Thank you to CEMA for supporting HeavenScent Manna! Weplan to bake chocolate cupcakes and cookies for the training this week.
Volunteer day was exciting today. Today was the last day of baking prior to Christmas. We made a variety of holiday treats including white chocolate and milk chocolate covered pretzels, peppermint bark, peppermint cupcakes, peanut brittle, pecan brittle and over 200 decorated sugar cookies! Big thanks to our volunteer bakers today (Amanda, Cassandra, Kaelyn, and Olga)! We really appreciate your support of of HeavenScent Manna Bakery and the women and children’s shelter.
Our thanks to Sherry Dunn ran a fundraiser on behalf of HeavenScent Manna. She donated profits from her MAC Zumba class sales to support the HeavenScent Manna Bakery mission. Thank you for running a fundraiser to support the HeavenScent Manna Bakery mission! Contact Sherry if you are interested in supporting a fund raising activity (or participating one) for HeavenScent Manna! sherrysilver1919@comcast.net