was the second monthly lunch hosted by Seva Café.  Omnipresent at the venue was a bespectacled man in khadi kurta-pyjama. He, along with other volunteers, was welcoming the guests and explaining the concept of the café—here, patrons aren’t charged for the food they’re served, instead they are free to pay whatever they want. Or, they can walk out without shelling out a single penny.  Meet Siddharth Sthalekar, who was orchestrating this “generosity enterprise” with ease. About three years ago, he was the co-head of the derivatives trading desk and the head of algorithmic trading at Edelweiss Capital. A typical day for this finan... posted on Apr 29 2013 (31,000 reads)

still don't know how beautiful Nature is, there are a lot of things we don't understand totally. I feel our understanding will be higher when it's collective. When more and more people have this understanding, we will be able to see more gifts Nature has ready for us. -- Joserra Gonzalez Jose Ramon Gonzalez (“Joserra”) is a service-hearted generosity entrepreneur, meditator, and activist for the common good. He is also the founder of "ReLoveUtion" -- a renaissance of compassionate societies. What follows is an edited transcript of an Awakin Call interview with Joserra, moderated by Rina Patel. You can read the full transcript or listen to the ... posted on Jul 21 2017 (8,426 reads)

Simpsons. It’s so funny and so brilliant, and it’s an example of one of the articles. It’s a fabulous issue; I hope people will subscribe and check it out. In the fall of 2019, the University of California Press will publish my book on The Revolutionary Possibility of Love. What I argue in it—and it’s really a central theme of the Network of Spiritual Progressives—is that most human beings actually want a world based on love, kindness, generosity, and caring for others—for everyone, not just for themselves—but they don’t believe it’s possible. So one of our central tasks is to help people overcome what I&rsqu... posted on Mar 30 2019 (8,686 reads)

I did I would always involve other people, as that was my tendency. As I gave money, I wanted to give more, so I started giving my time. As I gave time, I wanted to give even more. What could I give? I realized that at some point I just want to give myself. And the reward was that I was changing myself through the process. I didn’t need any external validation. It wasn’t that I thought, “Oh, look at that, I’ve changed your life.” It was more that the act of generosity was just so transformative and regenerative that the more I gave the more I wanted to give. Love is truly a currency that never runs out. So I tapped into that spirit in myself, and that&rs... posted on Jul 5 2019 (7,942 reads)

one must develop critical faculties. To be critical, one must disidentify with the object of critique, in our case, the dominant culture. This requires a de-colonization of one’s entire being. It is an ongoing praxis of deprogramming old constructs of greed, selfishness, short-termism, extraction, commodification, usury, disconnection, numbing and other life-denying tendencies. And reprogramming our mind-soul-heart-body complex with intrinsic values such as interdependence, altruism, generosity, cooperation, empathy, non-violence and solidarity with all life. These are not programs to be swapped out or software upgrades to a computer. The mechanistic metaphors of Newtonian phys... posted on Nov 1 2020 (6,283 reads)

whole world screams of fracture, more now than when I sat with Pádraig. Yet this conversation is a gentle, welcoming landing for pondering and befriending the hard realities we are given. As the global educator Karen Murphy, another friend of On Being and of Pádraig, says: “We are standing in the middle of a bridge and need to decide how we’re going to walk across it together, and in what direction. … Let’s have the humility and the generosity to step back and learn from these places that have had the courage to look at themselves and look at where they’ve been, and try to forge a new path with something that resembles &lsq... posted on May 18 2022 (3,133 reads)

The author of the article below is someone who has dedicated much of his life to volunteerism and generosity, and the below is his description when he was asked to keynote a conference of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs on Nov 10, 2011. Earlier this year, I had a casual lunch with an old friend whom I hadn't seen in many years. He then invites me to keynote his gala event last Thursday night. Quite a few of the who's-who of the Silicon Valley venture capital world were in attendance; not just money people but idea people too. Very innovative and entrepreneurial people. My instructions for the talk were: don't be humble, talk about scale. I actually laughed out on t... posted on Nov 14 2011 (33,758 reads)

being overwhelmed by afflictive emotions. You could say that all of those combined make a general skill, a resulting skill that is authentic well-being or happiness. TS: How do I make sure, when I’m cultivating something like altruism, that I’m not just sugarcoating my experience? For example, say I’m going to cultivate being generous. I’m giving, giving, giving, but really underneath I don’t really feel it. I’m just acting the part. MR: Cultivating generosity is not fundamentally by giving! It’s by cultivating generosity as an inner quality, and then naturally the giving will follow up! You don’t start by the action; you start by the... posted on May 14 2013 (55,593 reads)

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.”  8. Launch a Personal Generosity Experiment. If you’d rather give on your own, try the GOOD 30-day challenge. Each day for a month, GOOD suggests a different way to give. For more examples of random acts of kindness, check out Sasha Dichter’s 30-day generosity experiment and Ryan Garcia’s year of daily random acts of kindness. Dichter, the chief innovation officer at the Acumen Fund, embarked on a monthlong generosity experiment i... posted on May 29 2013 (32,673 reads)

assumption that we are inherently selfish beings. Giftivism flips that idea on its head. What practices, systems and designs emerge when we believe people WANT to behave selflessly? ServiceSpace evolved as an answer to that question. It started in Silicon Valley at the height of the dotcom boom. At a time of rampant accumulation. when a group of young friends began to build websites for non-profits free of charge. Money wasn’t the focus. The intention was to practice unconditional generosity. We delivered millions of dollars worth of service, but it was all offered as a  gift. And everything we did had to follow our  three guiding principles. [None of these principles... posted on Jan 15 2014 (89,163 reads)

mrovka / iStock The Concord Free Press (CFP) operates under a tradition-smashing publishing model. It thrives on generosity rather than the profit margin, and hopes to build up personal values rather than the industry’s bank accounts. This month, the press publishes Zig-Zag Wanderer, a collection of short stories by award-winning author Madison Smartt Bell. It’s a book with two covers. Flip to one, open the cover, and read “Stories from Here,” tales set in the United States. Flop it over, open the other cover, and explore “Stories from there,” fictional reports from international settings in Haiti and beyond. But the flip-fl... posted on Mar 17 2014 (14,638 reads)

a whole lot more fun) than other transportation alternatives." No serious disruption of values there. When what used to be shared informally turns into a formal, commoditized transaction, we lose something. That something is subtle, so it’s easy to gloss over. But over time, it cheapens our human experience. We strip away our commons, and we forget how to value things without a price tag. The highest potential of sharing is when it embeds the transformative spirit of generosity. When kids share their favorite toy, or when we share a seat on a crowded bus, or when we share our public parks, the quality of connections can go quite deep. It’s one thing to get i... posted on Jan 22 2015 (21,267 reads)

of data that suggest that the more pro-social behaviors spread through social networks more rapidly and more virally. It takes a certain kind of statistical sophistication in certain kinds of data, but we now can make the case for it. If I express gratitude to Nipun in the moment with a tactile expression, we know he will go on to other interactions and be more generous. Then, we know that those people whom he has touched will go on to other interactions and be yet more generous. My act of generosity here now transcending individual face-to-face contact is producing more generosity downstream. You can just project that out. These are very viral processes that build up cooperative networ... posted on Nov 4 2016 (30,532 reads)

we know what the interconnections are and have a deeper appreciation for the processes that create these goods. The MOON: Yes. And even cellphones and computers contain rare earth elements mined from far away by workers who are exploited, if not enslaved… Ramos-Stierle: Yes, so then we have to humbly recognize how much we owe to others. The root of the wordahimsa mean more than nonviolence, or doing no harm, in Sanskrit. It also means having a heart so full of love, generosity and courage that you have no room for resentment or violence or hatred. With this kind of heart, it is no longer a challenge for you to break laws that are unjust because you’re obeyi... posted on Aug 23 2016 (17,303 reads)

have simply made it all too easy to forget gratitude’s importance. We need not settle for our present disconnection from the healing, life-affirming, and uplifting human experience of gratitude.  By engaging with the perennial wisdoms, we are reminded of our natural capacity to feel and express gratitude. Through conscious and sustained practice over a period of time, we can discover again how gratitude and all its related qualities—thankfulness, appreciation, compassion, generosity, grace, and so many other positive states—can become integrated and embodied in our lives.  And when people in great numbers choose to practice, integrate, and embody gratitude, ... posted on Apr 8 2017 (21,603 reads)

about what is really going on. And that can be very difficult. MS. TIPPETT: I want to draw this out a little bit just because I know people will be listening from the United States. And this place, you talk about discovering all the many subtle and not so subtle ways people have to signal which “here” they are from and not from. MR. Ó TUAMA: Totally. And that is where language is limited. Because language needs courtesy to guide it, and an inclusion and a generosity that goes beyond precision and becomes something much more akin to sacrament, something much more akin to how is it you can be attentive to the implications of language for those in the roo... posted on May 6 2017 (9,670 reads)

it’s been waiting for. For me, the most important part of the word Bozakmin is “min,” the root for “berry.” It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for “gift.” In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can’t help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels... posted on Jan 19 2021 (10,754 reads)

the harm; and for every act of resistance, he advocated nine more actions for constructive social change. "Nonviolence isn't just a philosophy of resistance.  It is a way of life.  Nonviolence is the thoughts we have, the words that we use, the clothes that we wear, the things that we say.  It is not just an absence of violence, not even just the absence of wanting to cause harm.  Nonviolence is a state when your heart is so full of love, compassion, kindness, generosity and forgiveness that you simply don't have any room for anger, frustration or violence," Pancho describes. When Pancho stopped cooperating with the University of California syst... posted on Nov 29 2011 (166,493 reads)

before spreading, Kmart executives said. "It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year," said Salima Yala, Kmart's division vice president for layaway. The good Samaritans seem to be visiting mainly Kmart stores, though a Wal-Mart spokesman said a few of his stores in Joplin, Mo., and Chicago have also seen some layaway accounts paid off. Kmart representatives say they did nothing to instigate the secret Santas or spread word of the generosity. But it's happening as the company struggles to compete with chains such as Wal-Mart and Target. Kmart may be the focus of layaway generosity, Yala said, because it is one of the few large... posted on Dec 19 2011 (16,493 reads)

regnant, as though a revolution has taken place. Sometimes as the emergencies are resolved people seem to have a different sense of what is possible, for themselves personally, and for their society. But hope - hope is more for ordinary times. Mark Karlin: What is it about disasters that, while resulting in large loss of life, can also be societally liberating? I am thinking of your epilogue: "Disaster reveals what else the world could be like - reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings when it's absent from the stage." Rebecca Solnit:... posted on Jun 24 2013 (14,745 reads)