Who wants a cookie?

I'll confess to being pretty excited about the prospect of this 'project.'  It's nothing ground breaking, or even that difficult, but it's something consistant that will be fun for me personally and can maybe do a little good in the meantime - not so bad, right?

So I've vowed to not make it too complicated or have too many rules - I think my bottom line is that I have to do at least one type (batch) of cookies per week - but then I don't want to blow off vacation weeks so I'll also commit to doing this 52 times throughout the year - making sure I make up somewhere for vacations and travel/busy weeks etc. 

Ok, so that's easy enough now there's the matter of what happens to the cookies - since in my mouth is NOT the goal I'm after.  I had some ideas, but they were vague assumptions at best.  So I've been doing some homework and it wasn't too hard to come up with a whole list of appropriate, worthy charities here in Western New York.  I personally was familiar with a few residential 'hospitality' houses providing accommodations for patients, out-patients & their families during treatments and hospitalizations - primarily at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

These homes include:

Buffalo Ronald McDonald House

Kevin Guest House

Hope Lodge

There's also Gilda's Club, that's non residential but it would be a good candidate based on all the group support services they provide ( my thinking is that, while I'd like to support non-profit organizations, I'd also like for the cookies to go primarily to the people they serve and not just the staff).

And then there's Haven House which provides both residential and non-residential support to victims of domestic violence.

All of the organizations have big wish lists and requests for volunteers to do cooking for them - something else I've considered doing - but for now I'll start with the cookies.

The email request is being fine tuned - trying not drown them in details - if you know me you know hard hard this is for me!  But I'll get the note out and see what kind of response I get - I think initially I was thinking I bake for one single place and provide them different cookies every week, but now that there's so many worthy options, well I'm just going to have to see how it plays out.

This weekend I'll hit the discount stores and stock up on treat bags and things like zip loc bags and disposable containers since these items all appeared on the agencies wish lists ... hopefully I'll hear from a few places to nail down what needs to be done this first week - then the only thing I'll have left to decide is what cookie to bake first ... that's going to be the hard part!