Grainline Studio Supports Black Lives Matter

If you follow us on Instagram, you saw our post stating that we support the Black Lives Matter movement. I want to reiterate here that we as a team unequivocally support Black Lives Matter and are committed to doing the work to become better allies in the fight against racism in our society.

For the past four years we've been making a monthly donation to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, totaling approximately 10% of our profits. In addition to this, we've set up donations with My Block, My Hood, My City and the Chicago Community Bond Fund.

Our work cannot stop here. Sharing posts on social media and donating money are not enough. As a team we have been educating ourselves, listening to the community, and expanding on an action plan that we worked to create last year internally. I would like to share this here now, and I recognize that we have more work to do to fulfill each of these points.

• Continue to educate ourselves so that we can become better allies.
• Work to ensure that representation on our website and social media matches the diversity of the sewing community.
• A continued commitment to working with a diverse group of makers in our testing processes.
• Continuing to offer and increase compensation to everyone involved in the processes of developing and releasing our sewing patterns.
• Using our voice and platform to speak out against racism and inequality in the community.
• Creating a diverse team of content contributors for our blog and website.
• Volunteering and sharing our career experiences with Chicago students.
• Form meaningful partnerships with companies that also support this mission.

I look forward to sharing more about this with you as we continue to develop our action plan. For now I want to say to all the Black members of the community: we see you, we are with you, and we are committed to supporting you.

Many of you have been asking when our Archer Sew-Along will return – we will resume uploading videos later this week. We'd like to recommend these posts, articles, and videos in the hopes that you will watch and read them in the time you would have spent watching our videos.

The newly founded @blkmakersmatter coalition has done two excellent live videos which you can watch here and here. They are our community members – respect their space.

If you're not sure where to start reading, this anti-racism book list and this list of books, films, and podcasts are a great resource. I still have much to read, watch, and listen to on these two lists.