Why I Give to the Endometriosis Foundation of America
When I started building Anam Cara Clay Goods…
That is the business I want to run.
One where every pair of earrings I sell is quietly doing something beyond being beautiful.
I knew one thing clearly before almost anything else: I wanted this business to give back to something. Not as an afterthought, not as a marketing strategy, not as the thing I'd add later once the business was established enough to afford it. From the very beginning, giving back was part of what I was building. I just didn't know yet what it was supposed to be for.
I spent time sitting with that question. What cause? What organization? What felt real rather than convenient?
And then I found the Endometriosis Foundation of America, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Oh. Duh. Of course.
If you've read my endo story…
You know the medical version of what this disease has meant in my life — the years of pain before anyone had a name for it, the emergency surgery in 2017, the second emergency surgery in 2020, the staging, the fertility questions, all of it. That story is real and it's mine and I'm not going to retell it here.
What I want to talk about instead is what happened in my head the moment the pieces clicked together.
I had been living with endometriosis — really living with it, in the way that means it shapes your days and your decisions and your sense of what your body is capable of — for years before I found the Foundation. And I had been building toward this business for years too, quietly, learning the craft, figuring out what I was making and why. Two separate things happening in parallel that I hadn't yet thought to connect.
And then I found an organization whose entire purpose is to do the thing I had desperately needed someone to do for me — to say this is real, this matters, we are going to research it and advocate for it and make sure women don't spend a decade in pain before someone believes them. And something in me just recognized it. Not as a logical decision. As an obvious one. The kind of obvious that feels almost embarrassing in retrospect, like — how did I not see this immediately?
That is the business I want to run. One where every pair of earrings I sell is quietly doing something beyond being beautiful. One where the customer who buys something just because they love it is also, without having to think about it, contributing to research and advocacy for a condition that affects one in ten women and is still chronically underfunded and misunderstood. That felt right in a way very few decisions in building this business have.
Each month—
I give a portion of what Anam Cara earns to the Foundation. It's not a campaign or a limited-time thing. It's not tied to a specific product or a special occasion. It's just part of how the business runs — woven into it the same way the clay and the color and the late evenings in the studio are woven into it.
I think about it most on the days when a sale comes through and I know part of it is going there. There's something quietly satisfying about that — not in a self-congratulatory way, but in the way that comes from knowing your work is aligned with what you actually believe. I built this business because I believe women deserve to feel seen. In their creativity, in their joy, in their style, in their bodies. The Foundation is part of how I act on that belief in the most concrete way I know how.
There's a quote I love from Morgan Harper Nichols:
"How liberating it is to pursue wholeness over perfection." I've thought about it a lot in the context of living with endometriosis, because this disease has a way of making you feel like your body has failed some kind of standard. Like you're broken in a way that needs to be fixed before you can get on with the rest of your life.
Giving to the Foundation is, for me, a way of saying: we don't wait for perfect. We work with what we have, right now, toward something better. That's what the researchers and advocates are doing. That's what I try to do every moment in my studio. That's what I hope the women who wear these earrings feel when they put them on.
You don't have to be fixed to be whole. You don't have to be better to be worthy of beauty, and advocacy, and care, and a business that quietly has your back every time someone buys a pair of earrings they love.
That's why I give. And it's why I always will.