10 Ways to Serve by Washing

1. Google whether or not your favorite body wash is manufactured by a company that does animal-testing, or look at this list to find companies that don’t.
2. Offer to wash some of the toys in your church’s or community center’s nursery or day care.
3. Donate $1 to Share Your Soles, enough money for them to wash 30 pairs of donated shoes, which they then send to impoverished countries where shoes are a luxury.
4. Wash out some cottage cheese containers, cut a quarter-sized hole in the lids and put them on the containers, then gather some fuzzies and a few toddlers or preschoolers, and let them have fun stuffing the fuzzies into the containers. (Idea: Pinterest)
5. Visit ProjectLaundryList.org to find out how best to cold-wash or line-dry your clothes to save energy.
6. Wash your neighbor’s car or the outside of one of their windows.
7. Put six quarters in the coin dispenser of your nearest self-serve car wash.
8. Host a reverse garage sale for your neighborhood: gather their used items, wash them, and take them to your local Salvation Army.
9. Donate $5 to Ms. Jimenez’s classroom at Validus Prep Academy in an impoverished area of New York City, so that she can buy a washing machine and dryer for her students, many of whom don’t have access to them at home.
10. Sew a pillowcase, wash, and dry. Put it in a ziploc bag and send to ConKerr Cancer.

How Will You Give to Others This Week?

• Have you ever done any of these things? How did it go?
• What other acts of service have inspired you?
• How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

How Else Can You Make a Difference This Season?

• Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
• Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
• Enter to win this week’s giveaway.
• Join #gno this Tuesday and this Wednesday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.

What fun ways can you serve others this week?

My boys start the scouting program at the age of eight and move through the various rank advancements until they receive their Eagle Scout Award. This usually happens around the age of 15-18.

My oldest son is 17 years old. He earned his eagle when he was 15 years old. One of the last things you do to earn your Eagle is to do a 10 hour Leadership Service Project. This takes not only organization, but a lot of support from your leaders, friends, and family.

The project plan must be approved by a unit , committee, and district leader. When choosing a project the scout thinks about who will benefit from the project, how will they benefit, and how many people will it take to complete your project.

When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, my son decided that he wanted to collect personal hygiene kit items forthe people in Haiti. He contacted a group called the “Helping Hands for Haiti Foundation” and received all the information he needed for his project. This organization has been helping Haiti for over six years. They have built schools, bought land, taught farming skills to the Haitian people, and many other projects over the years. Right now they were in need of providing the people with hygiene kits and my son was excited to help.

The kits needed to include several things; toothbrushes, tooth paste, soap bars, towels, and combs. My son’s goal was to assemble 100 hygiene kids. He distributed over 300 fliers around the neighborhood in hopes that we could collect enough items to reach his goal. The project took just over a week to complete. 

Together with his family and scout group my son collected enough items to make 200 hygiene kits. It looked like Christmas in our living room when we packaged all of the items together. The generosity of our neighbors was unbelievable.

We had left over items that we were able to take to our local homeless shelter. This was a great experience for my son and for our whole family. I am thankful for the Boy Scout Program and for the opportunity it gave our family to serve and give to others. I am also thankful for the “Hands For Haiti Foundation” and all that they do to bless the lives of other.

I have two more boys left that are working their way up the advancement ranks. As each one reaches the age to earn his eagle, I hope that they will have the same enthusiasm and spirit of giving as my older son. This was an incredible experience that will have an impact on our lives.

What charitable organizations have you worked with in the past? What are you doing to raise charitable children?

Jill Greenlaw has a banking background. She is married and has four beautiful children. Jill loved being a stay-at-home mom for many years. She is now working for Mom It Forward as the editorial/community manager. Her interests include camping, motorcycling, boating, photography, reading, cooking, and traveling. Put her in flip flops anywhere warm and she is happy. You can follow her on Twitter.

The site was launched only three weeks ago by a network of over 400 mom bloggers from 15 countries—the United States, Canada, UK, India, Spain, Nigeria, Singapore, Netherlands, Pakistan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Jamaica, and the Philippines—who work with about eight international and U.S.-based nonprofit partners to voluntarily spread word about their new initiatives, advocacy campaigns, and fundraising efforts. The concept that compels MomBloggersForSocialGood is the rapid and wide dissemination of information about the good work being done by, and the needs of, the organizations working so hard to improve our world.

If there were one woman who would be THE Mom Making a Difference, it would be Jennifer James, MBFSG’s inconspicuous founder. She wrote, in 2010:

I, for one, admittedly have not been the type of blogger who concentrates on huge issues that plague our planet because in all honesty I feel too small to make a difference. I have perpetually been debilitated by the notion that since I really can’t make a huge difference I guess I won’t do much at all. [But] I finally hit upon an epiphany! Global issues about poverty and education, world hunger and sex trafficking, as examples, don’t need to be solved by me. Rather, they can be solved when intelligent, conscious people bring ideas and solutions to the table and then people like me (bloggers) move those ideas and solutions through the Net. That is where the power of change really happens. Similarly that is where I know my power to make small change lies as well.

Less than a year after she wrote those words, she got the opportunity to go to Kenya as a member of ONE Moms, along with MomItForward’s founder Jyl Johnson-Pattee . Jennifer says: “[That] trip changed my perspective on the world and challenged me to do more to help others.” And she has been doing more, along with the all the other members of MomBloggersForSocialGood. In the past three weeks, they’ve:

• Identified 12 areas of concentration: children, clean water and sanitation, communicable disease, education, environment and climate, fair trade, food security, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, non-communicable disease, women and girls, and workers’ rights.
• Grown by 100 members.
• Followed member bloggers on an insight trip to Haiti to observe Heart of Haiti artisans at work. These sponsored trips get MBFSG bloggers involved on “ground-level.”

Jennifer started MBFSG, but its power comes in the collective voice, the collective call to action, spread over 500 other blogs all over the world. That can’t help but make a dent in the problems of the world.

What charity work are you involved in? How is this making a difference in your life and the lives of others?

 

Our Season of Service challenge is for you to serve through scrapbooking, but this encompasses not only what you can make with pictures, but anything creative you can make with paper, since “papercraft” isn’t really a verb. Check out these bite-size ideas, and try and do just one of them this week.

10 Ways to Serve through Scrapbooking

1. Make 10 Happy Birthday cards (here’s one version you could use) and take them to the nearest assisted living center, to be handed out by the staff on residents’ birthdays.
2. Do a scrapbook layout on your best or hardest parenting moment.
3. Make a Valentine’s box like the ones you used to make in elementary school, and take it to work or church or book club, and invite others to make Valentines cards to contribute to your local Christmas Box house or other similar children’s charity.
4. Sell or auction off scrapbooking supplies or dummy scrapbook layouts and donate a portion or all of the profit to your favorite charity.
5. Offer to put together a small scrapbook or paper memorial for someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one. Pinterest and SplitCoastStampers have lots of ideas.
6. Make a card for someone who has inspired you, using this quote by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
7. Create a scrapbook layout about a difficult health challenge you’ve faced, and share it with others so that they can be inspired by your ability to put down on paper or put it into words your feelings about the situation.
8. Grab a bunch of old magazines or newspapers, some paper, glue, and embellishments, and help your kids make scrapbooks about issues they care about.
9. Make and send three anonymous thank you cards to people you’ve seen do good things recently. Once again, SplitCoastStampers and Pinterest are great resources.
10. Volunteer to teach a one-time class about scrapbooking at a foster family agency.

How Will You Give to Others This Week?

• Have you ever done any of these things? How did it go?
• What other acts of service have inspired you?
• How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

How Else Can You Make a Difference This Season?

• Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
• Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
• Enter to win this week’s giveaway.
• Join #gno this Tuesday and this Thursday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.

How can you scrapbook your memories and bless the lives of others?

 

Since “playing” is most often associated with children, most of these bite-size ideas are things you can do with your kids.

10 Ways to Play and Have Fun With Your Kids

1. Put together some play bags with household items like those suggested by Invention at Play, and see what your kids invent.
2. Role play with your kids situations in which they might be tempted or asked to cheat, and feasible ways for them to turn down those requests or not find themselves in situations where they feel the need to cheat.
3. Play these Dakotah Native American language games with your kids.
4. Play the role of an online mentor for about 20 minutes a week to a young college student, interested in math, science, technology, or engineering. Many of the mentees are women or people from groups typically underrepresented in technical fields. If you don’t have those skill sets, but know someone who does, let them know about Mentornet.Net.
5. Take your kids and some sidewalk chalk to their school playground in the evening, and write in big block letters: WE LOVE OUR TEACHERS.
6. Make everyone, including yourself, get off the couch and play—do something active—during every commercial when you watch TV tonight.
7. Read the requirements for a Presidential Active Lifestyle Award, which are essentially that youth “play” at least 60 minutes a day and adults for 30 minutes a day for five days a week for six out of eight weeks.
8. Role play with your kids effective ways to handle bullies, using some of our previously-offered tips or these other ones.
9. Play outside with your kids for one hour tomorrow.
10. Make at least five different kinds of play-dough with your kids tomorrow (here’s a site with 40 different play-dough recipes), and maybe help them take one batch to a lonely friend.

How Will You Give to Others This Week?

• Have you ever done any of these things? How did it go?
• What other acts of service have inspired you?
• How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

How Else Can You Make a Difference This Season?

• Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
• Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
• Enter to win this week’s giveaway.
• Join #gno this Tuesday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.

10 Ways to Use Your Computer or Your Skills to Serve Others

1. Use the AnySoldier.com toolbar, powered by Yahoo. Each time you search the Internet via the search box on the toolbar, Yahoo will donate a few cents to Any Soldier Inc. Your money will be pooled with money from others and used to buy care packages and other items for our servicemen and women.
2. Use the GoodSearch‘s GoodToolbar, which donates 50 percent of its sponsored search revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users. The money GoodSearch donates to your cause comes from its advertisers; the users and the organizations do not spend a dime. They also offer GoodShop and GoodDining. GoodShop is an online shopping mall of merchants dedicated to helping fund worthy causes across the country. Each purchase made via the GoodShop mall results in a donation to the user’s designated charity or school, averaging approximately 3% of the sale, but going up to 20% or even more. GoodDining is the first ever, national 365-day-a-year dine-out-for-charity program. Its users can eat in or take out at 10,000 restaurants nationwide and earn up to 6% donations for their favorite charity or school.
3. Use SearchKindly, either as your search engine or your home page, and they donate a small amount.
4. Use the Benefit Bar of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which strives to teach and emulate the principles of brotherly love, tolerance, charity, and truth.
5. Use a retirement calculator like this one to measure your preparedness for retirement. If you’re already on track, then share it with someone else. If you’re woefully behind, read this article about the necessity and the simplicity of planning for retirement.
6. Use your social media skills to coordinate the Facebook and social media presence of Big Family Mission, which helps rescue Russian orphan.
7. Use your web skills to design a landing page for TrekToTeach, which is a nonprofit that sends Western teachers to the hills of Nepal’s Himalayas.  The teachers live with host families and teach in the rural schools.  This opportunity closes in two days.
8. Use your design skills to generate a new logo for SOS, Inc., a nonprofit whose mission is to end sexual and domestic violence, child abuse and neglect through service, education, and advocacy. This opportunity ends in three days.
9. Use your creativity to come up with some fun ideas for a family conversation jar like this one (insert link to Subway traditions dinner conversation jar from 1/15/12), type ‘em up, cut ‘em up, put ‘em in a simple jar, and give ‘em to a friend as a gift.
10. Use your organizational skills to help clean up one room or one shelf in a friend’s house.

How Will You Give to Others This Week?

• Have you ever done any of these things? How did it go?
• What other acts of service have inspired you?
• How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

How Else Can You Make a Difference This Season?

• Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
• Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
• Enter to win this week’s giveaway.
• Join #gno this Tuesday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.

Except for the first video, all of them are fairly short. The are totally awesome so watch as many of them as you can!

10 Must-Watch Inspiring Videos and Movies

1. Watch Twelve Angry Men, a fascinating and thought-provoking movie about how we humans perceive justice.
2. Watch this short video from CreateTheGood.org about how to help others avoid investment fraud.
3. Watch this YouTube video about One.org and its efforts to prevent the unnecessary deaths of children around the world.
4. Watch and play this Fractured Fairy Tales game designed around literacy, with your kids.
5. Watch this YouTube video from the National Wildlife Federation about the relationship between sea ice and polar bears.
6. Watch this collage of inspiring acts in 2011 from Yahoo. Have tissues nearby.
7. Watch with your teen a cause video from DoSomething.org, to learn about various causes, like the fight to  prevent underage drinking.
8. Watch this video from RandomActsofKindness.org, from the Greater Good Science Center, about how science benefits the giver biologically.
9. Watch this video about the Amazing Shrinking Chip Bag, or a bunch of other cool, easy science experiments from SteveSpanglerScience.com.
10. Watch this video from PBS Parents about how to encourage math literacy in your kids.

How Will You Give to Others This Week?

• Have you ever done any of these things? How did it go?
• What other videos or movies have you seen that inspired you?
• How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

How Else Can You Make a Difference This Season?

• Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
• Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
• Enter to win this week’s giveaway.
• Join #gno this Tuesday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.

When you donate to charity, you are giving a little part of yourself away. Your gently used household items and food donations are clothing the needy and feeding the hungry.

Everything on this man and the puppies is donated from suburban moms! Jacket, shirt, puppy collars, puppy food, blanket, and puppy bag — you can only imagine how happy this made the man.

What items will you donate to charity? How will you teach your children to be more charitable?

Photo courtesy of flickr.

Tammy Kling is a life coach, crisis management expert, and advocate for the homeless. She is an international author of 37 books including The Compass. Tammy is also the founder of The Homeless Writers Project, an organization that helps those living on the street write out their hopes & dreams via writers workshops, free journals and other resources. Tammy is a mom of two boys, an avid trail and mountain runner, blogger, and adventure travel writer

Sole Hope provides closed toe shoes for people in Africa. I liked their mission. I liked that they worked both globally and in my hometown and I loved that providing closed toe shoes was a project in which my family could participate in together.

Sure, there were some steps involved in creating fabric shoes and a video to watch, but how hard could tracing and cutting be? In fact, this family project would be so simple and fun, that I invited friends to our night of making shoes, and turned it into a party.

Our friends could come, bring their kids, work for a couple of hours, teach our children a little something about giving, and outfit an entire African village in shoes. It would be a fantastic night.

But things didn’t really work out that way.

See, the jean cutting scissors my guests brought to the party weren’t really fabric scissors, and the pinking shears were non-existent, and the little, plastic, heel pieces were difficult to cut out, and oh, the whole idea of creating an entire shoe out of matching fabric was completely lost.

After an hour and a half of sixteen adults and a handful of kids working together, we created two pairs of shoes.

As adults filed out my front door and I looked at random pieces of material scattered around my home, I fought feelings of disappointment. Luckily, my nine-year-old skipped by.

“I can’t believe we made two pairs of shoes tonight!”

I smiled.

Maybe creating hundreds of perfectly made shoes wasn’t the goal. Maybe the goal was learning about new people in a far away place, stepping outside of our usual life, and rallying friends for a cause, and maybe teaching kids about giving isn’t about a perfect finished product, but about the act of giving itself.

Can you think of a time when your good intentions went wrong, but you learned something anyway? How did you turn it into a positive situation?

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

Can one beyond blessed family move from addicted to themselves to devoted to others? The author of this post shares honestly at Amy L. Sullivan about her family’s attempt to become less me, me, me focused and more others centered. Amy writes for print and online publications and is also writing a nonfiction book about serving others.

To start, we invite you to go to your closet or your kids’ closet right now and pick out five things that haven’t been worn in a year, put them in your car, and do the following:

1. Take them to your local women’s shelter, to help women who have had to flee their abusive partners, many times only with the clothes on their back.
2. Donate to Goodwill, which sells your clothing donations to help fund job training programs, employment placement services and other community-based programs for people who have disabilities, lack education or job experience, or face employment challenges.
3. Done to Salvation Army, which helps rehabilitate adults who have fallen on hard times and can also pick up your donations.
4. Donate to The Women’s Alliance or Dress for Success. See this post for more information about them or other ideas on where to donate used clothing.
5. Make a simple little girl’s party dress, if you have seamstress skills. If you don’t, buy an inexpensive dress, and mail it to your local children’s hospital.
6. Host a one-time book club at your house with three or four friends, and choose a book that ad-”dress”-es an important contemporary social issue.
7. Call a local assisted living center and ask if there is someone who has an approaching birthday who might like a couple of visitors, and take balloons, etc. to dress up their room or wheelchair.
8. Find the address of the publisher of one of your favorite books, and pen an actual letter of thanks to its author, like this woman did.
9. Grab any non-dress shoes (i.e., running shoes) that you haven’t worn in a year but that are still in good shape, and donate it to One World Running, an international program promoting an awareness of health, fitness and nutrition by providing running shoes to those in need in the United States and around the world. Here’s where you can take them.
10. Help acquaint your kids with the dress of other cultures by helping them play this “Buffalo Parts” game about Native American wear or breaking out some cardboard, ribbon, and felt to make simple versions of these Russian clothes.

How Will You Give to Others This Week?

• Have you ever done any of these things? How did it go?
• What other ideas do you have for providing others with clothes or doing service involving the word “dress”?
• How have others given to you this week and what difference has that made in your life?

How Else Can You Make a Difference This Season?

• Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
• Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
• Enter to win this week’s giveaway.
• Join #gno this Tuesday on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.