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The Essential Good supporting non-profits in Orangeville

July 25, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Makayla Pereira

Orangeville resident Kimberly Van Ryn has created a new way to give back to local non-profit organizations.

In December of 2018 Ms. Van Ryn created The Essential Good as a way to give back to the community.

“The motivation for The Essential Good was to engage in a socially conscious business to support the non-profit sector,” said Ms. Van Ryn.

“The Essential Good exists to ‘do some good’ with our innovative clothing line, utilizing art designs by individuals with developmental disabilities. We believe each shirt and the person wearing it has the power to transform their community, champion a cause and challenge others to do the same.”

The t-shirts have been the main driver of the project. The idea is to take something that is really beautiful, like pieces of art and showcase them on well styled clothes.

“It’s all the people that have invested themselves into their cause that motivates me,” said Ms. Van Ryn.

The Essential Good has donated to many local non-profits, among them Family Transition Place, Choices Youth Shelter, the Orangeville Food Bank and Special Olympics Dufferin.

As an employee of Active Lives After School (ALAS) Dufferin, which is a non-profit organization that supports individuals with developmental disabilities, Ms. Van Ryn says,.  “I also really like giving money away because it’s wonderful to see what local non-profits can do with a little bit of money. They can stretch it, they can make it go really far, which means the impact in our community is huge,”

Mr. Van Ryn says the idea for The Essential Good came about when she was a university student learning about social enterprise in one of her classes.

“I learned about social enterprise in a university course I was taking and I thought the concept was really interesting, so the concept of social enterprise as a business, with a social mission included. … I really liked that idea. Because of my position with ALAS, I can see first-hand how non-profit organizations struggle with funding and sometimes it’s hard to get grants when you’re a really small non-profit. The more I learned about social enterprise the more I started to realize that you could use business and market to generate funds for the non-profit sector.”

Ms. Van Ryn continues to do what she does because of her participants and families at the day program she manages. She says it’s a daily reminder that we can all rise above, give back and build sustainable community. 

She says that after just six months in business they have been able to donate almost $3,000 to local charities from the purchases of the t-shirts.

It started as an experiment to see if something like this could actually work and after six months of business she can confidently say it does work and people are interested in supporting it.

The t-shirts can be purchased at www.theessentialgood.ca

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