Monday, August 31, 2015

KIND CAUSES ENDS TODAY

Paper clouds family, we have been in the KIND causes contest for the month of August and it ends tonight at midnight!! We have been working so hard to get the word out to as many people as possible to vote and we are so appreciative of all of the hard work that you have been doing to vote and to get your friends to vote. Today is the final push...if you left someone out that hasn't voted, send them the link, call your mom, text your brother-in-law, email your best friend and tell them to take just a brief moment to vote for something that is so very important to us. We are so close, but we still need YOUR help! 

https://causes.kindsnacks.com/cause/paper-clouds-apparel-4/

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Kick cancer's ass together!

     This morning I was sitting with my usual cup of coffee watching the morning news when a commercial came on. It was a Johnson & Johnson commercial where a little girl, Emma, who has cancer, was sitting in her bed drawing pictures of her nurse and smiling. The nurse was laughing and playing with Emma, and for a moment you almost forget that you are watching these two happy lives intersect in a hospital. The nurse then had to inject Emma with medication through an IV, but he distracts her by signing a song to her that I'm sure most of us are familiar with: the name game song. You know, "Anna bana bo bana"...Anyway, my point is that even though the treatment that Emma has to go through is understandably scary for her, I was touched by how easy it was to distract her and cheer her up by singing to her, and even for a little girl of her size and age, she looked so brave and understanding to what she had to go through.
      Taylor Swift just recently had a concert in Phoenix where she sang the song "Ronan" co-written by Ronan's mother, Maya Thompson. In our current campaign we are teaming up with the Ronan Thompson Foundation which raises funds for research to treat neuroblastoma, the disease that ultimately ended Ronan's fight when he was just four years old. For those who have not seen the video of Taylor performing at her concert, I strongly urge you to go watch it. I personally had not heard the song sung in it's entirety before since it is not on Taylor's latest album, however, hearing the song once brought me to tears. The lyrics written from Maya's blog and from Taylor give us the image of an innocent little boy who likes to play with trucks, and to jump on his bed, and to run around the house without shoes on. Children like to play and dance and sing and adding the fight against cancer in their lives is something that no child should have to experience. Talking about childhood cancer is a sensitive subject, and I could write in this blog one hundred times over about the importance of getting your help to fund the research and the cure, but instead of me telling you just to go buy a Paper Clouds shirt or bag this campaign, let Ronan's words speak for themselves. If they touch your heart as much as they touched mine, I am nothing more than proud to wear one of this campaign's designs. 

"Ronan"

I remember your bare feet down the hallway

I remember your little laugh
Race cars on the kitchen floor, plastic dinosaurs
I love you to the moon and back

I remember your blue eyes looking into mine
Like we had our own secret club
I remember you dancing before bed time
Then jumping on me, waking me up

I can still feel you hold my hand, little man
And even the moment I knew
You fought it hard like an army guy
Remember I leaned in and whispered to you

Come on baby with me, we're gonna fly away from here
You were my best four years

I remember the drive home
When the blind hope turned to crying and screaming "Why?"
Flowers pile up in the worst way, no one knows what to say
About a beautiful boy who died

And it's about to be Halloween
You could be anything you wanted if you were still here
I remember the last day when I kissed your face
And whispered in your ear

Come on baby with me, we're gonna fly away from here
Out of this curtained room in this hospital grey, we'll just disappear
Come on baby with me, we're gonna fly away from here
You were my best four years

What if I'm standing in your closet trying to talk to you?
What if I kept the hand-me-downs you won't grow into?
And what if I really thought some miracle would see us through?
What if the miracle was even getting one moment with you?

Come on baby with me, we're gonna fly away from here
Come on baby with me, we're gonna fly away from here
You were my best four years

I remember your bare feet down the hallway
I love you to the moon and back

          

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Have you done something kind today? Read this and find out how you can!



This month, Paper Clouds Apparel has entered into the KIND causes campaign where KIND snacks company supports one cause with 10,000 dollars. We can achieve the goal of being awarded this grant with your help! With the 10,000 dollars, we do can lots of great things for PCA and the PCA family. We would like to use the grant to update our website so that we can have more artist designs available. Also, we would like to create a "classics" section of the website where some of our classic designs are available to order in case some of you may have missed a campaign. Moreover, we would like to use majority of the grant to have job fairs for those with special needs and to train them with skills to help them find employment. 90 percent of individuals with special needs are unemployed and it is our goal to lower this number. Finally, we would love to use the grant to provide more opportunity for art design where we could bring in varieties of art teachers for those with special needs so that they can be exposed to many types of art and find the kinds of art that they like best. In addition to one-on-one teachings from art teachers, PCA wants to provide students with a bag of art supplies so that they are able to continue to pursue their artwork at home. With the KIND grant, it would give PCA more opportunity to expose more artists and showcase talented individuals with special needs worldwide...And voting for this cause is so easy! Go to https://causes.kindsnacks.com/cause/paper-clouds-apparel-4/ and vote for Paper Clouds. You can even share your vote on your Facebook or Twitter account for an extra vote. The campaign ends September 1st and we are so close! The best part is, you are doing something kind that takes about 30 seconds! Right now, we are in 2nd place, but with your vote we are just one step closer to our goal. It is so important to us that individuals with special needs are able to go out and use the skills that they are gifted with and with your help, there will be so much more opportunity for that. With the hopeful enhancements to the website that I mentioned, I would love to hear feedback about your favorite Paper Clouds Apparel item that you ordered and how the purchase affected you and your family. That design may just end up on our classics section! Thank you for all your support! 

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Paper Clouds Apparel means more than just a cool shirt.


Hello readers! My name is Abigail, and I am an intern for Paper Clouds Apparel. This past week I had the privilege of working with Robert and Ben where we organized and packaged shirts from the last campaign (The Return of Logan and the Crumb Diaries) to be shipped out to buyers from all over nation. The numbers of orders were outstanding—there were piles and piles of paper clouds goodies laid out everywhere in the quaint downtown Phoenix office. There wasn’t an assembly line or an assigned group of people working on a specific packing task. Everything was done by the team, a group of six of us, by hand. We started with taking everything out of the boxes. Shirts were organized by designed and were kept in plastic baggies packaged by special needs individuals. Then we organized by size, brand of shirt, etc. After everything was organized, we began to package the orders, reading off orders name by name. Rebecca: skull scoop neck in red size small. We would package Rebecca’s shirt and then she would receive a card personally written to her, along with a photo of her designer, which was Logan this past campaign. And this would happen for everyone that ordered something from Paper Clouds, some orders even requesting dozens of items. Each of them had a personal letter, a personal package, and personalized care to get that to them. I think that the most amazing part for me being able to witness this process was to see how much care goes into each order from Paper Clouds from start to finish. It starts with the design, it’s printed, it’s packaged in plastic bags one by one by hand, and then it is organized by hand so that it comes to your door exactly how you ordered it with a few surprises inside the package. Never, during that whole process is anything automated and it’s cared for by human hands from start to finish. Moreover, the customer isn’t just a number, the customer has a name and are made to feel special and important by their purchase which coincides with the fact that by that purchase of a shirt, a trucker hat, or a tote bag, they in turn have made someone with special needs feel important and can make a difference in their lives. Starting out with the position, I had no idea how much time and effort went into every campaign, and despite the growth of Paper Clouds, the care has remained completely personal. It really makes wearing a Paper Clouds item more valuable knowing of how an item’s worth extends beyond its price. 






Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Why the cure for childhood cancer is so pressing.

We know the term "cancer" broadly, understanding that it is the division of abnormal cells in the body that are the cause of the disease, and even though we know that there are different types of cancers, the search for the cure seems to--in many ways--encompass "cancer" for all stages and all ages. However, in our current campaign for children with cancers such as neuroblastoma, we want to emphasize the importance of finding treatments and cures for cancers that attack children because we know that a child with cancer is much different than an adult who battles with a type of cancer. Whereas as cancer in adults can be brought on by lifestyle (even though not in all cases), cancers in children are undetectable in their earliest stages and nearly impossible to predict before their attack. The Arizona Cancer Foundation for Children is partnered with the Ronald A. Matricaria Institute of Molecular Medicine at Phoenix Children's Hospital where they are focused on finding treatments that are more personalized for individual patients. However, finding these treatments for children are difficult knowing that a child's makeup differs from that of an adult, and often times, children are treated as adults are for their cancer. Childhood cancers come in a wide range of types and sub-types, many of which are not found in adults at all. Moreover, with the eligibility for cancer like neuroblastoma to attack a child before they reach their first birthday, the chances of cancer spreading to most of the body before detection is high. If a child wins their battle with cancer, the importance of adequate treatment does not end there. The aftermath of treatments like chemotherapy and radiation can have lifelong affects that can lead to additional harm as they grow older. The St. Baldrick's Foundation raises funds and awareness for childhood cancer by shaving heads around the country, not only to further the funding of the cause, but to stand strong alongside those children who have to lose their hair as a side effect of treatment.  With childhood cancer being the number one disease killer in children, we are overjoyed to team up with the Ronan Thompson Foundation, the St. Baldrick's Foundation, and the Arizona Cancer Foundation for Children to provide this current campaign and continue to help raise funding and awareness for researching for such a pressing cause: removing "cancer" from someone's childhood. 

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