From Order to Olive Grove: How a FALASTIN T-Shirt Becomes a UPA Grant
How a UPA grant actually gets funded is not a complicated question, but FALASTIN rarely answers it in more than one sentence. So here is the fuller version: someone orders the Heritage Olive Tree T-Shirt for $60 CAD, the order is cut and printed only after that sale, the business covers its own costs first, and everything left over becomes part of a UPA grant to the United Palestinian Appeal's work in health, education, and community and economic development.
TL;DR
TL;DR: FALASTIN's Heritage Olive Tree T-Shirt sells for $60 CAD. The garment is made to order, so the business covers its own production and fulfillment costs first, and whatever profit is left, all of it, goes to the United Palestinian Appeal. That is the UPA grant this piece traces: not a fixed dollar figure or a named project, but a structure, real profit, all of it, every order, funding programs that include support for Palestinian farmers still working land that has grown olives for thousands of years.
What Actually Happens Between an Order and a Donation
A customer orders the Heritage Olive Tree T-Shirt. Nothing is cut or printed until that order is placed; FALASTIN does not warehouse finished garments and sell down a stockpile the way most apparel brands do. The $60 CAD covers the fabric, the printing, the shipping, and the ordinary costs of running a small business. What remains after those costs is profit. FALASTIN does not keep a share of it, and does not set part of it aside for a campaign season while holding back the rest. All of it goes to the United Palestinian Appeal.
That word matters. FALASTIN says "profits," never the softer marketing word other brands reach for when they mean something smaller and would rather not say so. Profit is a number the business can actually point to.
How Does a UPA Grant Get Funded?
The mechanism is worth stating plainly rather than folding into a general line about giving back. FALASTIN's production is made to order, a decision the brand made deliberately rather than the cheaper route of warehousing and running large batches. The revenue from an order first covers the real cost of making and shipping that specific order. What is left after that is profit, and every dollar of it is sent to the United Palestinian Appeal, the Washington, D.C. nonprofit FALASTIN has partnered with since it was founded.
United Palestinian Appeal reports that 98 percent of what it spends goes directly to its programs, with the remaining 2 percent split between management and fundraising, a ratio stated on its own site alongside its Guidestar and Charity Navigator listings. UPA was founded in 1978 as a nonpartisan, nonsectarian 501(c)(3), and it funds work in the West Bank, Gaza, and Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon across four areas: health, education, outreach, and community and economic development. A UPA grant drawn from FALASTIN's profit is pooled into that last category, where UPA runs an agriculture program alongside small business development and facility construction and renovation.
The Agriculture Program a UPA Grant Actually Funds
UPA describes its agriculture program as support for Palestinian farmers through sustainable practices meant to increase food security and financial independence. The same page states the problem the program exists to answer: land access is not guaranteed for every Palestinian farmer, and where it is restricted, day labor has become more reliably paid than farming for many families. Training and start-up resources aimed at the people still choosing to farm anyway are what the program is built to counter that with.
Olive trees are the clearest place to see why that matters. Over 10 million olive trees grow across roughly 86,000 hectares of the West Bank, close to half of all the region's cultivated land, and somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the annual harvest for income. FALASTIN has written about that harvest, mawsim al-zaytoun, in more depth elsewhere. A grove planted this decade can still be bearing fruit in a century. Supporting the people who keep that cycle going, through training, through resources, through the plain maintenance of turning up every season, is what this kind of grant actually funds.
Why the Olive Grove, and Not Just the Grant
FALASTIN did not put an olive tree on a t-shirt because it needed a symbol for a donation program. Olive cultivation in Palestine stretches back roughly 5,000 years, one of the oldest continuous olive-farming traditions anywhere, and groves are passed down through families across generations rather than bought and sold like most crops. The olive tree the brand already writes about as a symbol of roots and endurance is the same tree a UPA grant, in part, is trying to keep in the ground.
The Heritage Olive Tree T-Shirt is not a fundraising product with a slogan stitched onto it. It is a garment that happens to fund the kind of work, land, food security, a family's ability to stay on the farm it already has, that the symbol has stood for since long before FALASTIN existed.
What a UPA Grant Does Not Promise
FALASTIN does not track which specific project a given order's profit lands in, and it would not be honest to say otherwise. United Palestinian Appeal pools donations across its programs the way most established nonprofits do; a single t-shirt order does not adopt a named grove or a named farmer. What is verifiable is the structure: real profit, all of it, every order, sent to an organization whose own reporting shows the overwhelming majority of that money reaching programs rather than overhead. The full explainer on United Palestinian Appeal covers its health and education work in more detail; this piece is about the mechanism, not a substitute for that record.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does FALASTIN donate a percentage of sales, or a percentage of profit?
Profit, not sales. Sales revenue covers production and fulfillment costs first. Whatever is left after those costs, the actual profit, is what goes to the United Palestinian Appeal in full.
Which UPA program does a specific order's profit fund?
FALASTIN cannot say, because United Palestinian Appeal pools donations across its health, education, and community and economic development work rather than earmarking individual gifts to a single project.
How is United Palestinian Appeal rated as a nonprofit?
UPA reports that 98 percent of its spending goes directly to programs, and it maintains listings with Guidestar and Charity Navigator. It was founded in 1978 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.
Written for FALASTIN by Jad Sahyoun, with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed for accuracy against the United Palestinian Appeal's own published program information.
At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Heritage Olive Tree collection. Made to order, the same way every FALASTIN piece is produced, one order and one UPA grant at a time.
100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.