Random Acts of Kindness: TVG Day of Service
By Patty Olsen, TVG Senior Project Manager
Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was more than just a single day of giving back to the community where I have lived, worked and flourished. It was an opportunity to model what principled citizenship looks like to my elementary-age son. The idea of how to best spend our time on MLK day started weeks before. Our conversations sparking a vision of what we could accomplish and what would be most meaningful. Our vision of the day included a variety of ideas, but we ultimately decided to incorporate “random acts of kindness” into our day of service.
My son brought home a “random acts of kindness” calendar from school. This calendar had a list of opportunities to do kind things throughout the month. These acts of kindness created the momentum for the day and enhanced the activities we had originally planned. We started looking through the list to see what we could accomplish while we visited members of our church who are home-bound or living at a senior or retirement center. Here’s a few of the random acts that helped us to add to the experience of those who we were visiting:
• Make someone a card just because
• Send flowers to a nursing home
• Smile at someone you don’t know
• Do chores for someone else
The entire day of making cards, buying flowers, and taking time to visit and get to know seniors in our community was an impactful experience for both me and my son. My hope is that my son will continue this tradition in the future. Hopefully it will become a fundamental part of his life as a student, future employee and leader in the community.
If you want to integrate a corporate social responsibility (CSR) program at your place of work, visit our website to let us know! We are passionate about getting our employees involved in our community to make a difference and we are inspired to help others find that passion, too!