on the spot, the name and phone number of someone who wants to give or receive something to/from you. It is essential to follow up, or the gift circle will end up feeding cynicism rather than community. (photo via George Eastman House Collection) Finally, the circle can do a third round in which people express gratitude for the things they received since the last meeting. This round is extremely important because in community, the witnessing of others' generosity inspires generosity in those who witness it. It confirms that this group is giving to each other, that gifts are recognized, and that my own gifts will be recognized, appreciated, and recip... posted on Jun 13 2012 (26,537 reads)

of the best ways to increase our own happiness is to do things that make other people happy. In countless studies, kindness and generosity have been linked to greater life satisfaction, strongerrelationships, and better mental and physical health—generous people even live longer. What’s more, the happiness people derive from giving to others creates a positive feedback loop: The positive feelings inspire further generosity—which, in turn, fuels greater happiness. And research suggests that kindness is truly contagious: Those who witness and benefit from others’ acts of kindness are more likely to be kind themselves; a single act of kindness spreads through ... posted on Dec 12 2015 (21,046 reads)

of silence before meetings, 21-day challenges as a group, circle of sharing. Instead of dramatic, overnight changes, we find small nudges to be much more potent. At a Denmark hotel, guests chose apples over sugary-snacks when they placed a "apple a day, keeps the doctor away" sign next to it. On organ donation forms, countries with default of 'yes' lead to 97.56% donations, while default of 'no' leads to 22.73% -- what is the default for igniting greater generosity? Research shows that introducing just one consistent contributor tilts the entire network towards more generosity. Small acts make a big difference. (Reference: Designing For... posted on Jan 12 2017 (19,040 reads)

this week I was rendered speechless by the power of unexpected generosity. The first was an actual gift from someone I barely knew, and the second was a story of survival that took such courage to write that I experienced it as a gift.  The gift was brought by one of my students, from her mother who I only met once. It was her mother’s way of saying thank you to me for loving her daughter so well, and I literally could not speak when I unwrapped it. A weaver, she raises sheep for wool which she shears, cards, cleans, spins and dyes with plant dyes before weaving it into blankets and shawls.  She made a shawl for me, determining my colors from that one time we met ... posted on Feb 2 2022 (3,995 reads)

with, packing more punch than you might imagine. This approach to life starts with the following premise: What exactly did I (or you) do to deserve to be alive? If you can process that question and come out thinking it was a gift that you can't ever pay back, then beginning a life of greater giving is the only logical and remotely reciprocal way to go. If the most valuable thing you have isn't anything you earned, why be stingy with all the lesser stuff. You can start that practice of greater generosity with greater gratitude. And where better to start than with your mother, but don't stop there. Family, friends and the final frontier, strangers, are all worthy subjects. Let's review what... posted on Jul 9 2011 (31,329 reads)

Microsystems. I contacted Nipun and he responded very quickly with, “Yeah, we’d love to talk about what we’re doing.” I didn’t have any expectations one way or the other. We met at a café in Berkeley. He was very engaging and it seemed like it was going to be an okay story. Then he said something that sort of blew me out of the water. Just off-handedly he said, “CharityFocus is really not about helping anybody. It’s really about engaging in generosity to help yourself.” It wasn’t the construct I had in mind. It was going to be about these brilliant young engineers helping, right? Then the more I thought about it, wow! That... posted on Apr 18 2014 (9,012 reads)

wonders in seventeen places around the world. What works, though, isn't the intellectual idea -- it's actually the experience. It's actually realizing that when you walk in, the greeter is a volunteer. The person who is waiting on your table, the person who plates your food, the person who's bussing your tables, they're all volunteers. That guy doing dishes in the back, who signed up to be on his feet for six hours, to just do dishes so you can have an experience of generosity, is also a volunteer. When you realize this, it begets a very different kind of generosity in you. A flow of deep compassion emerges. It's very natural. Minah Jung was a student at U... posted on Oct 28 2015 (32,498 reads)

a greater good gives us a sense of purpose. "To forge community then, we must do more than simply get people together.... Community is woven from gifts." And that shared sense of community builds on itself: "On a less tangible level, any gifts we give contribute to another kind of common wealth – a reservoir of gratitude that will see us through times of turmoil, when the conventions and stories that hold civic society together fall apart. Gifts inspire gratitude and generosity is infectious. Increasingly, I read and hear stories of generosity, selflessness, even magnanimity that take my breath away. When I witness generosity, I want to be generous too. In the com... posted on Jul 2 2017 (9,104 reads)

I can carry on Carry on. Carry on. Carry on. Pavi:  Such medicine for these times. Thank you so much. Carrie Carrie:   Oh, well thank you. Pavi:  And as serendipity would have it, just that we were sharing the story of Parker Palmer, we had a comment come in from him and a question for you. He said, “You are one of the most generous people I've ever known. Can you talk about where that impulse comes from in your life and though I know you don't do generosity in expectation of a return, how do you experience the rewards of being generous?” Carrie: As usual, a wonderful question from Parker. Generosity and if  kindness is a country ... posted on Jul 15 2023 (2,655 reads)

all know gift giving is an essential, ritualized part of the holidays. But what about the rest of the year? There’s good reason to practice generosity even after you’ve greeted the New Year. As we’ve reported in the past, giving activates parts of the brain associated with pleasure and social connection; releases endorphins in the brain, producing a “helper’s high”; and provides many long-term health benefits. But we aren’t always as giving as we could be. Fortunately, Greater Good has published dozens of articles on how to foster generosity in children, institutions, society—and within ourselves. Here are seven top tips, culled from ... posted on Dec 25 2011 (12,305 reads)

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 (30,970 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 (8,383 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 (8,630 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 (7,882 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 (6,245 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 (3,111 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 (33,669 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 (55,517 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 (32,611 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 (89,047 reads)