Greetings from Christina
People say that no one will contribute to or invest in a television show. People say that it’s a vanity project and you can’t expect people to contribute their hard-earned dollars to my ego.
The truth is that those statements couldn’t be further from the truth.
We are all worried for the future; for our children and their children and what sort of world we are leaving them. We are all looking for ways to step lighter on our overworked and underpaid planet.
We all need strength and wellness to cope with these interesting times in which we live.
Investing in the production of Christina Cooks invests in what I like to call the biggest classroom in the world. When Robert and I began this project in 1997, we had options. We could have gone the route of commercial television and made more money, sat back and lived easily on those profits. Instead, we decided to stay true to our mission of education on national public television: to help people to have a healthier relationship with food; to provide information that helps people to make the healthiest choices they can and to tread lighter on the planet by way of those choices.
Purely educational (even though I can be funny sometimes), we use our cooking show as the vehicle that draws people in and gets them hooked. Gorgeous food will do that.
Do we help people? I don’t know; you’d have to ask the thousands of people who email us or some of the millions viewers who tune in faithfully each week to discover the impact of food on wellness and how they can use food to live well.
As I planned this ask, I had thought I would write another lofty piece about why you should donate. In the end, I decided to be direct (a flaw of mine…) and lay out the truth.
To produce for public television means raising all of your production budget from outside sources; sponsors and donors. Of course, it also means that we control the message; no one tells me what I can and can’t say on the show. I have no advertisers to worry about losing. But television is an expensive proposition; I’m not going to lie. It’s worth it, but we need your support. Hard stop.
The work I do is important; not just to me, but to people who want to live better and healthier lives.
I’ll end by saying that I hope you see the value in what I do as much as I do. Not reliant on sponsors who might demand that I compromise what I believe or whose product I must endorse; I prefer to rely on the people who watch the show; who support my mission; who wish for a better future.
I hope you are one of those people.
In peace and gratitude,
Christina
Donate here: https://christinapirello.org/donate/donations.php
