10 Bite-Size Ways to Help by Talking

1. Call a grandparent to say “I love you.”
2. Call (don’t text, DM, tweet, etc.) a friend you haven’t talked to in a week or more to see how they’re doing.
3. Write one Facebook post about an accomplishment or positive trait of your husband. Better yet, tell him directly.
4. Write a letter to yourself, as if you were someone else, expressing your love and appreciation.
5. Write your own obituary. Pretend you’ve lived a long, full life, and write down the qualities and accomplishments you hope people you will remember you for. Make a goal to do the kind of actions that demonstrate those qualities once a day every day starting today.
6. Write your own family manifesto. Check out Isabel Kallman’s for an example.
7. Visit an organization that serves children removed from the custody of one or more of their parents, like The Christmas Box House, a group home, or a women’s shelter. See if you can spend one hour with a few of the kids, hear their stories, and share some encouraging words.
8. Ask a question like, “If you could be any character on TV, who would it be?” at the dinner table, and see what conversation ensues. See this post about conversation jars for more question ideas.
9. Strike up a conversation with at least two people you haven’t met before at your next church or school meeting.
10. Ask your cashier at the grocery store how they’re doing next time you go grocery shopping, and listen to their answer.

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.

You see, fourteen years ago, Lee was raising her three small children and beginning a seven-year battle with a rare form of lung cancer. According to Wikipedia, she had previously given her then husband, Emery Rhodes, glass blowing lessons, and in them he created small glass cups, or “baby glasses,” which she would light with tea light candles to find solace during the difficult cancer treatments. Her friends started asking for them, so she hired local glassblowers in 1998 to produce more “glassybaby,” and began selling them out of her garage. In 2001, the Glassybaby company was officially formed, with the small, but durable, and colorful glass votives as their sole product.

Four years later, Martha Stewart received some glassybaby as a gift, and decided to have Lee appear on her show, and sales increased dramatically. In 2007, glassybaby moved to a studio and retail shop in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood. In 2009, they opened two more stores in Seattle and a store in New York, and Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos purchased a large stake in the company because he was so passionate about the product. By 2010, sales hit $4 million and were up 50% from the year before. Sales grew more than 30% in 2011, despite the fact that naysayers said a company with a handmade product and goodwill mission would fail. Earlier this year, 2012, Lee was named Entrepreneur of 2011 by Entrepreneur magazine, the first woman to have won that award.

Needless to say, meteoric success has played an important role in this story. But what is more fundamental to its meaning, is the fact that, since its beginning, part of Lee’s vision has been for glassybaby to bring peace to others, not only through the warm light the candles emanate when lit from within, but also through actual donations made by the company to various nonprofits related to health, healing, and quality of life. They make those donations in three ways: 1) giving 10% of the gross sales of certain glassybaby directly to charities or organizations chosen each year, 2) donating the use of their studio and “hot shop” to nonprofits, and 3) donating glassybaby to different charitable organizations to both decorate their fundraising events and to auction off the glassybaby to support their cause.

The ultimate motivation behind all of this is that, during her cancer treatments, Lee met many other patients who could not afford even daily needs such as bus fare, childcare, or groceries. Today, most of the money donated by glassybaby goes directly toward meeting those basic needs. To date, Lee’s company has donated more than $900,000. The more glassybaby sold, the more money is given away to charity, with the eventual goal being to give away 10% of all revenue (as opposed to profits) to charities.

Like Megan Faulkner Brown, who we talked about recently, Lee has tasted not only the sweetness of success but of service. She says, “The reason I do this is to give back. We believe that if you commit to your mission, people will commit to you. Our mission is to help people find what they need to heal. We have built a community that loves and shares our mission.” And as she’s done so, she’s built a life that bespeaks triumph over the challenges that used to beleaguer her: summiting Mount Kilamanjaro last year after surviving cancer, and building a successful, charitable company despite the odds.

Did you know as recently as the 1970s, the average American belonged to half-dozen or more civic organizations that did volunteer work in their communities? Lions Clubs, the Masons, Rotaries, Chambers of Commerce, etc. Today, we’re lucky to be involved with even one. It’s no wonder everyone joins social media sites like crazy; we miss that connection, not to mention the opportunities for doing social good.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t have much outside organizational involvement, I admit. But when choosing a church for my family, one of the conditions for me was that the church “walked the walk,” instead of just talking the talk. My church does many outreach activities, including a monthly dinner at a homeless shelter. This outreach is particularly dear to me. As a recovering alcoholic, I know that the ranks of the homeless are filled with addicts who haven’t been able to find recovery, and reaching out to them with this dinner has helped me connect with them and serve as proof that recovery is possible. Helping the homeless has actually become a family issue; my husband does outreach and photography of the homeless here in Philadelphia as well.

But I haven’t stopped there. Because of my large social media footprint, I try to use that for social good as well. I help promote a variety of women and children related non-profit organizations, particularly those that focus on women’s health. It’s not the same as being hands-on, I realize that, but sometimes it’s better than nothing.

I want to instill social responsibility in my daughter; I’ve considered taking her to the homeless dinner but, unfortunately, the facility isn’t zoned for children. But I talk with her about helping people, about how important it is to reach out a hand and help whenever you can. One of the (very small) things I’ve done is helping her pick out (gently used) clothes and toys to give to our local battered women and children’s shelter. She loves knowing that her “stuff” is going to other kids in need. I’m not sure you can teach generosity, but I’m going to give it a shot.

I wish I could do more; as is typical today, time is at a premium. I work hard, and make my family a priority, and it can be hard to remember that there are plenty of families in need out there, too. One of the ways that I’ve managed to free up my time has been to make sure I keep myself focused and organized; it’s one of the great gifts that working with a startup (that happens to focus on organization!) has given me.

What are you doing to teach your children about social responsibility?

Featured image courtesy of Flickr.

Cecily Kellogg is the mom of near six-year-old daughter, a wife, and the social media strategist for AboutOne, an online family organizer that turns your phone into a remote control for your life, working with your existing calendar and contact tools so you can automatically organize, store, and share family memories and household paperwork. Through web and mobile apps, AboutOne guides you along the path to organization, rewarding you along the way for meeting your organizational goals.

Ten Bite-Size Alternatives to the Traditional Bake Sale

1. Ask your favorite bakery what they do with their day-old cookies. If they tend to have a lot of leftovers, give them the phone number of your favorite children’s charity to facilitate a donation of the cookies by the bakery to the charity. This makes a win-win-win situation for all: the bakery doesn’t waste all those cookies, the children get cookies, and you get an easy opportunity to serve.
2. Send some cookies or brownies to someone who needs a pick-me-up, in an Imperial Sugar Bake-It-Forward tin.
3. Buy something at a Great American Bake Sale near you.
4. Sign up to host a Great American Bake Sale.
5. Call your nearest assisted living center, and see if they would be okay with you bringing a plate of cookies in for their residents.
6. Use Facebook or Twitter to get a few friends to do a virtual/IRL “bake-off” with you, where you each make some sweet treats, take them to a neighbor or friend in need, and then “meet” together after to see how many people your positive actions affected.
7. Offer a giveaway on your blog to the person who bakes the most yummy or unique things for others.
8. Buy a special cupcake from the Sweet Tooth Fairy, to help prevent bullying.
9. Bake some brownies and leave a couple on a coworker’s desk, perhaps anonymously.
10. Like five food blogs today.

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.

10 Bite-Size Ideas for Helping Through Reading

1. Ask your child’s teacher if, during Teacher Appreciation Week, your child and his or her classmates can do one 30-minute to 1-hour long service project for the teacher, whether it be cleaning the classroom windows and desktops, organizing files, or taking out the recycling bin. It is often through bits of service, done as a team, that the kids better understand their teachers and the work they do. Consider reading to the class as they work, or hiding large word strips around the classroom for the kids to find by cleaning/organizing and can put together to read a rewarding message.
2. Contact your schools’ PTA representative and volunteer to help out for an hour or two on Field Day.
3. Find out when and where the next Taste of the Nation Culinary Event is taking place (they take place all over the country), and attend one, making sure to read the menu.
4. Go to Scholastic or Amazon right now, and let each of your kids choose two new books that they’d like to read. Choice is often a strong motivating factor in getting kids to read.
5. Visit your local library with your kids, or if you don’t like your local library, find out if there is a better one from which you can purchase a library card. Consider spicing your families’ visit up by thinking of several book titles beforehand that they can locate, and then solve a puzzle by rearranging the words of the titles or find a few words in each book to put together and make a fun message.
6. Read these tips on how to monitor your teen’s online activities.
7. “Like” your favorite author’s Facebook page.
8. Tweet or write a blog or Facebook post about how reading or literacy has blessed your life.
9. Donate $10 through DonorsChoose.org to help purchase some Sammy Keyes books for Ms. Chamberlain’s fifth-grade Florida classroom, to help them get up to grade-level reading skills.
10. Have every member of your family write up a “job description” listing what they have to do every day. Your tween’s list might have items like: “getting dressed for school on time,” “making my bed,” and “getting my homework done.” Your three-year-old’s might list “going pee on the potty,” and “putting on my shoes.” This is their opportunity to list as much as they want, in either pictures or words. Write up one of your own for yourself if you want to. Then, around the dinner table, have everyone swap and read each other’s lists.

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.

10 Simple Ways to Build Enthusiasm for Trees

1. Go buy a tree.
2. See if your kids’ school teachers will allow your kids to make short presentations on the benefits of trees, and help them put together a short Powerpoint presentation or crayon slideshow of how they clean the air or lower household energy costs.
3. Identify the types of trees in your neighborhood, favorite park, or along your favorite walking trail with your hubby or kids.
4. Donate $5 to Ms. Senecheck’s high school environmental science class in Barnesville, Georgia, through DonorsChoose.org, so she can buy 2 Nooks for her students to download wildlife guides to learn how to identify various trees and the fauna that inhabit them.
5. Play Tiltworld, an app, so you can accrue a lot of points, so a lot of mangrove trees can be planted in Madagascar.
6. Help to identify the trees around you if you live in San Francisco, and log them onto UrbanForestMap.org, so they can calculate the exact environmental benefits of the trees, which will help urban foresters and city planners to better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings.
7. Sell any used textbooks you have, or buy or rent a textbook for a husband, son, daughter, niece, or nephew at Chegg.com, which in turn plants trees.
8. Make tree cookies with your kids by either having them put green and brown M & M’s in rolled-out sugar cookies, or seeing if you can make one large sugar-cookie “cross-section” of a big tree, with rings, etc.
9. Make an art or craft project with the medium of your choice expressing your gratitude for trees. If you dare, post it on Facebook on Arbor Day.
10. Pick a tree in your yard or neighborhood to pay special attention to, clearing away brush around its base, pruning if necessary.

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.

10 Bite-Size Ideas to Improve Your Life and Others by Attending Something

1. Attend a free musical event with your family to experience the joy of beautiful music together.
2. Attend a caucus or campaign event of a presidential candidate to become more informed about their qualifications and confirm what political issues are most important to you.
3. Make a $5 donation to a local camp for people with disabilities, so they can attend and experience the beauty of the outdoors.
4. Attend a movie with someone you wouldn’t normally go with, so you can forge a new friendship.
5. Attend the next general meeting of your child’s school’s parent/teacher organization, so you can become more familiar with what they’re doing to enrich your kids’ educational experience. Or attend a community council to provide your opinion on how funding should be allocated at your school.
6. Brainstorm some great names for the Spring marketing campaign of ArtsBoston, to help them “laser-focus” on promoting events that kids, teens, and families can attend. This opportunity is available for four more days through Sparked.com.
7. Attend a storytime or other event offered at your local library, so you can expand your horizons and those of anyone you take with you. My library offers everything from film screenings to panels for prospective writers.
8. Donate $10 to Builders Without Borders to help them build homes and schools that under-served kids can attend in countries like Haiti, Mexico, and Pakistan. BWB advocates the use of natural, local, and affordable materials in their construction projects.
9. Offer to provide a ride, buy a few groceries, or clip food coupons for someone in your neighborhood or someone who attends your church who may have mobility problems.
10. Attend a community education class on the basics of sign language.

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.

10 Ideas for Helping Through Avoiding

1. Go to EttKlickForSkogen.se, a Swedish-based website in English, and click on the “click for the forest” button.  Each click on the button generates a small of money from sponsors of the site to help avoid the chopping down of old-growth forests in Sweden. According to HelpFromHome.org, the amount of forest saved per click varies between 2-30 square decimetres depending on how many sponsors they have at the time of your click and how much the sponsors are paying per click.
2. Help young latinos avoid unproductive or criminal lives by brainstorming and scheduling tweets for the LasFotos Project, a community-based program that teaches creativity through photography. This challenge is available through Sparked.com for four more days.
3. Buy only propylene-glycol-based antifreeze, to avoid accidental antifreeze poisoning in house pets and young kids.
4. Switch out a sugary treat you would normally consume for something not as bad but still very tasty, like (my favorite) Post Selects Banana Nut Cereal, for one week, so as to avoid weight gain, low energy, and possible health problems.
5. Help re-write the “About” page of InvisiblePeople.tv, a blog trying to help homeless people avoid the feeling of invisibility by telling their stories. This challenge is available through Sparked.com for seven more days.
6. Make a simple “hello” card similar to this one I made or these really simple ones from SplitCoastStampers, and deliver it to a neighbor you’ve never met before today, helping both of you to avoid possible loneliness.
7. Avoid negativity by replacing one complaint you would have made today with a positive comment about something else.
8. Go to your local laundromat or other place you wouldn’t normally go to and fill five machines with quarters, or give them directly to people already there, to help them avoid having to deplete their possibly scant resources.
9. Read this post on how to avoid fear of volunteering.
10. Watch this video with your kids about ways to avoid internet predators.

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.

What things do you do to avoid bad things and situations in your life? What can you do to turn a negative into a positive?

10 Ways to Cultivate Friendship and Health

1. Design a new logo for Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen, California. They also need someone to create a Google Adwords campaign for them. This opportunity is only open for five more days on Sparked.com.
2. Add the All For Good widget to your blog to help your readers more easily access volunteer opportunities, both virtual and IRL, and cultivate the idea that volunteering really isn’t that hard.
3. Help an elementary teacher in Joplin, Missouri cultivate a love of science, learning, and creativity in her classroom by donating $5 through DonorsChoose.org to help buy science supplies for her students, the majority of which lost everything last year when a tornado ripped through their town.
4. Buy some pea or flower seeds and a little bit of dirt, plant the seeds, and help them grow until late Spring or early Summer, then give them to a friend or two, with a note saying: “I grew these for you!”
5. Make a lunch for your husband, kid, or yourself, one more day this week than you normally would, or read one of our posts on healthy living, to inspire you and your family to live more healthily.
6. Find the phone number, website, or email address of the person or department at your husband’s or your work who can tell you whether the company offers wellness incentives, or is planning on providing healthy lunch options.
7. Add a logo badge for the Alliance for International Women’s Rights to your blog or site. The Alliance cultivates future women leaders in developing countries, with a current focus on Afghanistan.
8. Help cultivate an appreciation of, and an imagination about, the past in the younger generation by contributing a memory about a place that doesn’t exist to the Place and Memory Project.
9. Cultivate a love of reading by setting aside 30 minutes tonight to read with or to one of your kids, and talking about your books together.
10. Decorate the door of one of your children or even a friend during the night to cultivate love and friendship.

 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.

10 Ways to Prevent Disease

1. Have your kids create a hot chocolate stand which is a twist on a summer lemonade stand. Your kids can then donate some or all of the money raised to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to help fund research that will prevent future cases of the disease.
2. Pick a chronic disease, like fibromyalgia, and read about it with your kids and what it’s like to live with it. Discuss with them what’s being done to help prevent it.
3. Take your mom to get a mammogram. Or, go with a group of girlfriends to get a mammogram.
4. Help design brochures and other printed materials for a child abuse prevention agency. This opportunity is only available for two more days through Sparked.com.
5. Offer two hours of respite care to a friend who takes care of someone with a chronic illness, to help prevent that friend’s physical or mental fatigue due to constant work.
6. Read about the signs of domestic abuse so that you can recognize it if it happens to a friend or loved one.
7. Inquire at your local library about any local book clubs or the possibility of you starting one, if the library offers book club kits, and promoting it through the library. Or, if that’s too complicated, start up a chat about one of your favorite books in our Chat Room, to prevent boredom or isolation.
8. Cut out one soda per week for one month, to prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes.
9. Prevent the gradual loss of your intelligence by reading one book each week for a month.
10. Read this article about biologist Rachel Carson’s efforts to prevent the extinction of a pelican bird species, and be inspired.

 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.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr.