Campaign fundraising usually evokes images of fancy parties and famous faces – but one Crown Heights woman came up with another recipe for bringing in the bucks.
Priscilla Maddox, a retired nursing home worker, has raised an estimated $2,000 for the Barack Obama campaign by selling boxes of a treat she calls “Obama Cookies.”
Inspired by Obama’s victory in the primaries and the prospect of seeing an African-American president, Maddox started wondering what she could do to help out.
She Chips in
“Everybody knows a cookie,” she said, “but chocolate chip was not enough.”
So she got creative and added some caramel and vanilla chips to the traditional recipe, and the Obama cookie was born. The cookies run five for $20.
“I didn’t want to make it exotic, I wanted it to be ‘main street,’” Maddox said, laughing at her use of the election buzzphrase.
Maddox was able to grow her cookie idea into a full-fledged fundraising project, complete with a processing plant and website: cookieforchange.com.
Business Plan
As a co-owner and co-founder of Kitchen for Hire, a successful commercial kitchen she and two former co-workers, Joan Reid and Rayda Marquez, opened in 2000, Maddox already was armed with business savvy and connections.
Working with her partners, Maddox contacted a Poughkeepsie processing plant, which pumped out cookies early enough for one of the first boxes to make it Denver for the Democratic National Convention.
Despite the distance her cookies have traveled, most of her business has been coming from the area surrounding her kitchen on Washington Ave., where images of Obama adorn nearly every store window.
On a recent Friday morning, local resident and gallery-owner, Monifa Johnson stopped in at Kitchen for Hire, requesting cookies for the second Art for Obama party she planned to host. Just a couple weeks earlier, local bar Sepia sold 100 cookies on the night of one of the presidential debates.
Rose Huang, who has volunteered much of her time to the cookie project, raised about a hundred dollars in cookie sales at a party she recently hosted. The party, held at the White Rabbit in Manhattan, invited patrons to draw Obama-inspired art, after purchasing Maddox’s cookies at the door.
High Hopes
“I am inspired by Obama,” Huang said through sniffles she blames on fundraising exhaustion. “I am inspired by the movement of people, and how Obama is able to capture the hearts of millions of people.”
Reid also feels inspired. “Before this, I’ve never been involved in political [fundraising]. “ she said. “During Kennedy’s time, maybe we would volunteer, but nothing this intense.”
Reid said she’s investing her energy in the Obama campaign for the next generation. “It gives them hope,” she said. “To see a person start from low means to build himself up to become the presidential nominee.”
Maddox agrees, though she insists she won’t be crushed if the Nov. 4 results are not in Obama’s favor.
“Even if this guy loses, I won’t be sorry, because this is the closest an Afro-American has ever gotten,” she said. “Just that he got this close is good enough for me.”
