Cookies Taste a Lot Like Love: #OperationGratitude

Thousands of miles away and MRE's to eat, how much would you love homemade cookies?

 

I learned about his from my mom whose church regularly sends cards letters and care packages overseas to the armed forces. My mom and her fellow church ladies bake some of the best cookies in the world so they gather up all kinds of goodies and treats and send them overseas where the taste of “down home” surely brings many smiles of satisfaction. Those who are less gifted in the baking department, such as ME, can make $15 donation to Operation Gratitude, which pays for one care package for one serviceperson. Operation Gratitude has end over a million of these kindness kits around the world!

Holiday Acts of Kindness: Pay It Forward

Teach your children well: here's one sure-fire way to successfully pass it on:

If your heart and your wallet have different ideas about making monetary donations, it is time to summon your inner regifter.  An unwanted gift could be a welcome donation to a charitable organization. For help selecting a charitable organization, visit the Better Business Bureaus’ Wise Giving Alliance. You can also contact the government office responsible for registering charities in your state. A little research upfront will make sure that your donation is put to good use.  If the process of selecting a charity seems daunting, remember, you benefit from giving as well.  

Involving your children in the selection of and contribution to a charity teaches valuable lessons.

Give to causes in your own backyard as well as internationally

You have an opportunity to make a difference.

Some charitable gifts are tax-deductible if made to a qualified organization.

But be sure your organization meets IRS guidelines, as there may be different tax breaks when you donate certain types of assets to charity. 

Share the Love: A Volunteer Christmas

The holidays can be a difficult time for many people who don’t have family nearby, a home to sleep in, or food to eat. Helping others expressed the true holiday spirit. 

A great way to be a good in the world is to do good for the world and the people who inhabit it. Volunteer a few hours of your time to work in a soup kitchen and help serve those who are in need of a hot meal. You can also use this time to get your family involved and impart good moral values on your children. For many years running, I have volunteers at Glide Memorial Church in downtown San Francisco and enjoyed each and every minute of it.  I bet your community has a place like Glide that can be your “happy place” meaning that you make other people happy and that alone filled YOU with joy.  But if you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay Area around Thanksgiving or Christmas, come on down and we’ll have fun together serving up some love:

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GLIDE on over and Serve a Meal!

The Volunteer Resource Program at GLIDE places about 10,000 volunteers each year, totaling 65,000 hours of service. www.glide.org Meals Program is a transformative experience. This program requires 85 volunteers each day to fill the breakfast, prep, lunch and dinner shifts, 364 days a year. With your help we can serve up to 2,400 meals per day to our community. Volunteers assist with everything from serving food, to bussing tables, to handing out silverware and condiments. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves, and make some beautiful human connections! you have any questions please feel free to contact the volunteer team at volteam@glide.org or 415.674.6081

Sign up To Be Santa’s Helper #HolidayActsofKindness

You know Santa needs your help, rght? This is soooo easy you gotta do it!

 

Go to your local Post Office in around Christmastime and pick one of the letters to Santa that they get every year. 

Buy and send the gift before Christmas to the child who asked for it.

Operation Christmas Child: A Box of Love

Are you starting to feel the holiday spirit? Good! Now, get busy!

 

Pack a shoebox with new toys, school supplies, socks, whtever you think a young child might need. Just go to www.samaritianspurse.org for more information on how to pack a box. It will be donated to a child in need (you can decide the gender and age group) and you can even track the box to see where it ends up! Check out this website for some packing ideas: http://faithfulprovisions.com/2012/10/01/101-operation-christmas-child-shoebox-ideas/

No One Should Go Hungry: Practical Acts of Kindness

Stopping World Hunger, 10 Grains of Rice A Day

 

Save a few dollars each month and donate it to a different charity. The website http://freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/1504 quizzes you online and for each answer you get correct, they donate 10 grains of rice through the World Food Program to help end world hunger. Think about how much rice will be donated if even half of the population did this!

Blanket the World With Love

Do you remember Linus of the venerated Peanuts cartoon? 

He was a piano virtuoso who loved his blankie and also shows how universal that love for just the right soft cloth can be. My mom and aunts are amazing quilters and can seemingly take anything and make a gorgeous, collectible quilt from it. Even if you, like me, lack that “quilting gene,” you can blanket the world with your love and good intentions by collecting them for donation.  I put out a call and got a ton of nice comforters to donate to Project Linus,  www.projectlinus.org for gifting cozy quilts and oh-so-warm blankets to kids in shelters, hospices, hospitals and wherever the cloaking comfort of love might be needed. My mom recently made a quilt of some of my crazy outfits from the 80’s so I can only hope the leads of Linus have a good sense of humor and a love of neon colors!

Donate Books to Migrant Children Separated from Families: 2000 Libros

1.  The 2,000 Libros charity is giving books to migrant kids separated from their families, and you can help them bring a little bit of happiness to these children's live
2. 
3. Founded in July by Washington, D.C. residents Elizabeth Ballou, a former part-time writer for Bustle Digital Group, and Kristin Stadum, 2,000 Libros' "mission is to provide books to immigrant children who have been separated from their families and placed in centers across the U.S.," according to its Facebook page. The charity is working in conjunction with D.C. Books to Prisons, a similar organization that collects books for incarcerated people and prison libraries. As of a July 19 article in The Huffington Post, 2,000 Libros has sent care packages totaling 500 books to two detention centers: California's Crittenton Services for Children and Texas' Southwest Key. Titles sent to migrant children include Spanish-language translations of Captain Underpants, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Lucha Libre, and The Little Prince.
4. If you want to help 2,000 Libros to send books to migrant kids in detention centers, you absolutely should. Ballou and Stadum told The Huffington Post that they did not know how long they would be able to continue operating their charity book drive, due to professional obligations. However, you can still donate to 2,000 Libros through the D.C. Books to Prisons website, with the money going to purchase books from the charity's wishlist.
5. 2,000 Libros also accepts Spanish-language and bilingual books donated at four area bookstores: East City Books of Washington, D.C.; Busboys and Poets of Washington, D.C., Shirlington, Va., and Hyattsville, Md.; Kramerbooks and Afterwords of Washington, D.C.; and One More Page Books of Arlington, Va. East City Books is also taking orders for books from 2,000 Libros' wishlist on its website, as is the Politics and Prose Bookstore of Washington, D.C. The charity's Facebook page requests that donated books meet the following criteria:
6. New or gently used
7. Appropriate for kids in elementary or middle school
8. Relevant to Latin-American culture
9. Interested people with the time and means to do so are also encouraged to hold book drives for 2,000 Libros in their own cities.

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A Lesson I Learned From My Mom for Mother's Day

 I witnessed my mother tithe at church when I was a child and noted she did so with pride. I was also not unaware that she “did without” and did not get herself new purses or clothes or anything so she could take care of my sisters and me and be able to give her little bit of extra pocket money to the church. I learned about self-sacrifice and also about living from your values in this way. Experiment with tithing. There is a universal law of tenfold return. This means that when you give freely, your return is tenfold. You don’t give to get the return; you give freely, and what you give flows back to you tenfold. Particularly in terms of money, many of us think the law of attraction doesn’t apply. It does. Money is simply energy, and when you allow the energy of abundance to flow through you, then money and other resources continue to flow to you. When you stop the flow of abundance out of fear, anxiety, and worry, the flow of money stops. During the next six months, experiment. Whenever you get money, before you pay any bill, take 10 percent and give it to something you believe in. What is most important is that you give with an open heart.

Just like my mother's open heart. 

How You Can Help Our Most Vulnerable

Welcome to the World!

Assemble a baby care kit to help young mothers care for their newborn babies. Visit the Church World Service website for information on what to pack and where to send the shipment: http://www.cwsglobal.org/get-involved/kits/baby-care-kits.html

The Healing Power of Touch

Be a baby cuddler! “Baby cuddlers are needed in orphanages, neonatal hospital units, group homes, nurseries, and wherever else there are babies and young children who may not have adequate human contact early in life to begin developing social interaction skills.” http://www.volunteerguide.org/hours/service-projects/baby-cuddlers

Be a Good Samaritan

Did you know this is National Samaritan Involvement Week? Now you do and I have no doubt you can immediately be helpful to someone, somewhere. Doing a favor for someone without expecting something in return is the epitome of kindness and will earn you some karma points down the line (though don’t expect any!) Sometimes helping others is the best way to help yourself and anytime one of my friends is singing the blues, I will say, “Let’s go server some beans down at Glide Memorial! You still stop feeling sorry for yourself in the first 60 seconds.”

Operation Gratitude

I learned about his from my mom whose church regularly sends cards letters and care packages overseas to the armed forces. My mom and her fellow church ladies bake some of the best cookies in the world so they gather up all kinds of goodies and treats and send them overseas where the taste of “down home” surely brings many smiles of satisfaction. Those who are less gifted in the baking department, such as ME, can make $15 donation to Operation Gratitude, which pays for one care package for one serviceperson. Operation Gratitude has end over a million of these kindness kits around the world!

Gifts From the Heart

Make Merry!

Santa Claus came early to a Pennsylvania retailer this year. In early December, an anonymous man walked into a store and told he manager he wanted to donate $50,000 to help pay off customer layaway accounts. “We made him say it twice,” said store manager Steve Meyers. “When we started calling customers, they thought it might be a joke”. The donor, who asked to be known only as Santa B., arrived just in time, as unfulfilled layaway orders were set to be cancelled that day. “He just wanted to bring Christmas cheer to everyone,” Meyers said. “He was in and out, kind of like Santa Claus.”

Today is National Forgiveness Day; Let Go, Move On and Heal

National Forgiveness Day

 If you have born a grudge for someone, forgive them or let it go. You don’t need that negative energy in your life. Remember that forgiveness is not absolution; what happened in the past still happened but what you are doing is relieving yourself of the burden that has been weighing you down. Now you can heal. Our society is also in need of lessons in forgiveness and a dramatic reminder of this can be found in the film and foundation behind www.unlikelyfriendsforgive.com where we learn the real power of atonement and the art of forgiving, even after brutal acts of violence. 

Now is the Time for Kindness and Simple Acts of Goodness

Live Aloha@

In the beautiful paradise known as the Hawaiian Islands, there is a tradition of “Living Aloha.” This one encompasses all of the aforementioned good deeds, which is why it’s the most important of all. In the Hawaiian tradition, “aloha’ stands for the akahai, lokahi, olu`olu, ha`aha`a, and ahonui—in English, these words translate to kindness, bringing unity, politeness, humbled, and enduring. If you live your life with simple acts of goodness every day and follow the tradition of native Hawaiian islanders, you will surely become a good in the world.

You Can Make a Difference for Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas Where People Still Need Help!

Be a Good in the World

Take stock of your day-to-day life. Are you giving to others or is a little out of balance where your work, your immediately family gets 99% of what you offer the world?  You can change that in one day. Donate more of your time or money to a charity. Supporting a cause will help keep you informed about social issues and can strengthen your sense of well being while benefiting others in the process 

Buy One, Donate One- Your New Shoes Will Give a Child in Texas, Florida or Puerto Rico New Shoes, too!

Who Knew Compassion Could be So Comfortable?

Buy a pair of Tom’s shoes. They are a one-for-one organization that donates a new pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair of Toms purchased. Visit http://www.toms.com/ to learn more about the cause and view the various styles. I like the shiny glittery Tom’s!

The Red Cross can use more than your blood; more ways you can help Puerto Rico

Give Life

Donate blood. One donation can help up to four people. If that’s not inspiring enough, every three seconds, someone needs a blood transfusion due to various injuries, illnesses, or conditions. Donating is completely free and completely safe. (http://www.bloodcenters.org/) Go to the American Red Cross website (http://www.redcrossblood.org/make-donation) to find a location near you. And you usually get cookies and juice after your donation! Did you know this?

For some people, health, time, and logistical restraints means donating blood isn’t possible. But blood donation isn’t the only way to support organizations like the Red Cress. As well as financial donations, the Red Cross also accepts airline miles and credit card rewards. Easily transferable from your computer, these sorts of donations don’t cost anything but can still make a difference.

Here's how You Can Help the Kids Going Back to School in Texas and Florida

Pack a shoebox with new toys, school supplies, socks… go to www.samaritianspurse.org for more information on how to pack a box. It will be donated to a child in need (you can decide the gender and age group) and you can even track the box to see where it ends up! 

Check out this website for some packing ideas: http://faithfulprovisions.com/2012/10/01/101-operation-christmas-child-shoebox-ideas/

Did you know your old prom dresses can become a kid's favorite blanket?

Do you remember Linus of the venerated Peanuts cartoon? He was a piano virtuoso who loved his blankie and also shows how universal that love for just the right soft cloth can be. My mom and aunts are amazing quilters and can seemingly take anything and make a gorgeous, collectible quilt from it. Even if you, like me, lack that “quilting gene,” you can blanket the world with your love and good intentions by collecting them for donation.  I put out a call and got a ton of nice comforters to donate to Project Linus,  www.projectlinus.org for gifting cozy quilts and oh-so-warm blankets to kids in shelters, hospices, hospitals and wherever the cloaking comfort of love might be needed. My mom recently made a quilt of some of my crazy outfits from the 80’s!

Blanket the World With Love