As a former teacher I have always been confident in my ability to teach facts, figures and all the basics to my kids . What I worry about more is teaching them how to be generous and giving as well as confident enough to stand up for causes they believe in . This summer Amy from Teach Mama , Amanda from Not Just Cute and I had the pleasure of all attending EVO. While there we came up with this idea of getting our readers excited about teaching their kids about giving and standing up for what they believe in first hand. We didn’t want to limit families to one charity or cause because we wanted each of you to choose something close to your heart, your community and something your child could get involved in.
My children and I will be devoting our time, money and toys to our local food bank. Every Saturday I will put up a reminder to link up, tally and to spotlight any work we have done for our cause and what others have done too. Seeing little hands making a difference is totally inspiring!
How does this work? Read our full resource document here .Included are some great causes if you aren’t sure which to choose.
The basics are as follows:
- Choose a cause.
- Introduce your child(ren) to the cause and participate as a family in serving in some way. Donate food, sell baked goods and donate the proceeds, gather clothing or toys… the possibilities for giving are endless .This initiative runs until December 31st 2012.
- Come back and tell us all about it. Link up a blog post about it. Take a picture of your kids giving back. Tweet or instagram it using the #blog4cause hashtag .We want to show the world what a big difference little hands can make. Add your blog post about it below and add the details of your experience in our tally . In early January we will tally up all hours served, all food and toys donated and all the difference little hands can make.
This is great! We’ll be brainstorming this week. 🙂
I am so glad Joyce! We talked about it tonight at the dinner table. I am always amazed at kids capacity for giving provided we offer them the chance!
This is a great idea! We have a couple of projects already planned for the holidays!
Oh, I am so excited, Allie! What a great effort!
Great idea! We had such a wonderufl experience particpating in Moms FIghting Hunger and can’t wait to do good here too. 🙂
Such a great way to get in the right spirit for the holidays! I can’t wait to read all of the inspiring stories! Thanks for hosting!
Operation Christmas Child is a wonderful project for the whole family to get involved. They now have barcodes that you print with your box tags – it links to your email and you find out where your box went. Pull out the globe 🙂
Alison
That is so cool – giving and geography all in one.
We already focused a lot on giving and on passing along the values of compassion and caring for others to our children before I started blogging, but blogging has helped me to increase this as a family focus and to see the value and impact such giving and sharing can have in the world. Recently, I wrote an article about our 12 Days of Christmas Giving activity (http://jennifischer.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-season-of-giving-12-days-of-christmas.html) for a local online news source and shared the details about the family our giving activity sought to help. The result was that someone read the piece and donated over $7,000, which the family was seeking to raise for a bone marrow transplant. Truly, blogs for cause in action!