- Join a Community of Givers. To find other givers, join a Freecycle community to give away
goods and see what other people need (www.freecycle.org). Another inspiring community of givers
is ServiceSpace (www.servicespace.org), the home of a series of Giftivism initiatives started by
Nipun Mehta. Headquartered in Berkeley, California, ServiceSpace has over 400,000 members and
sends over fifty million e-mails a year. Yet they still operate by three rules: “no staff, no fundraising,
and no strings attached.” Through ServiceSpace, Nipun has created a platform for people to increase
their giver quotients, divided into three categories: gift economy projects, inspirational content, and
volunteer and nonprofit support. One of the gift economy projects is Karma Kitchen, where the menu
has no prices. When the bill arrives, it reads $0.00 and contains just two sentences: “Your meal was a
gift from someone who came before you. To keep the chain of gifts alive, we invite you to pay it
forward for those who dine after you.” Another gift economy project is HelpOthers.org, which
collects stories of people playing giver tag: do something anonymously for someone else, and leave a
smile card inviting them to pay it forward.
Nipun describes how one woman at a Fortune 500 company went to get a drink from the vending
machine, and put extra change in with a note: “Your drink has been paid for by someone you don’t
know. Spread the love.” Then, she brought in doughnuts and left another smile card behind. “A guy
noticed this trend, and he decides to send an e-mail to the whole building,” Nipun says, laughing.
“The guy writes, ‘I’ve been trying to track them down for a long time, and I think it’s between floors
two and three.’ Now everybody’s on alert for kindness, and a bunch of people start doing it.” On the
ServiceSpace website, you can order smile cards, help support nonprofit causes, subscribe to the
weekly newsletter, or read a thought-provoking list of ways to give, such as paying the toll for the
person behind you or thanking people for helping you by writing a complimentary note to their boss.
“The more you give, the more you want to do it—as do others around you. It’s like going to the gym,”
Nipun says. “If you’ve been working out your kindness muscles, you get stronger at it.”
Another impressive initiative is HopeMob, billed as the place “where generous strangers unite to
bring immediate hope to people with pressing needs all over the world” (http://hopemob.org). For
ideas about how to organize your own group of people to perform random acts of kindness, see the
initiatives under way at Extreme Kindness in Canada (http://extremekindness.com) and The Kindness
Offensive in the UK (http://thekindnessoffensive.com). The Kindness Offensive is a group of people
who strive to be aggressively helpful, organizing some of the grandest random acts of kindness in
human history. They’ve provided a toy for every child in a hospital in London, given away half a
million pancakes, distributed tons of giveaways at festivals around Britain, provided free medical
supplies and housing support to families in need and hosted tea parties for elderly people, obtained
an electric guitar for a ten-year-old boy, and landed free front-row seats and behind-the-scenes
training at the Moscow Circus for a father hoping to surprise his daughter. It may be no coincidence
that the founder’s name is David Goodfellow.
You might also be intrigued by BNI (www.bni.com), Ivan Misner’s business networking
organization with the motto of “Givers gain,” as well as the Go-Giver Community
(www.thegogiver.com/community)—a group of people who read The Go-Giver fable by Bob Burg
and John David Mann, and decided that giving would be a powerful way to live their professional
lives. - Launch a Personal Generosity Experiment. If you’d rather give on your own, try the GOOD
thirty-day challenge (www.good.is/post/the-good-30-day-challenge-become-a-good-citizen). Each
michael s
(Michael S)
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