{Twin Cities Moms Blog has partnered with Doing Good Together for this sponsored post. We love this business and all that it offers to families! Read on for more info.}
Making Time to Teach Compassion with Doing Good Together™
We at Doing Good Together™ recently met up with the wonderful folks at Twin Cities Moms Blog and were thrilled to find such a great, engaged group of parents right here in our home town.
I’m excited to introduce you to Doing Good Together, a Twin Cities-based nonprofit dedicated to making it easier for your family, and mine, to raise compassionate kids.
I speak from experience. I stumbled upon Doing Good Together (DGT™) when my daughters were just four and two-years-old (they’re nine and six now, with a three-year-old brother!). My family has essentially been a guinea pig, testing projects and trying out conversation starters.
I share my family’s experiences with these tools each week on DGT’s Blog.
The secret to raising compassionate kids is simple, really: add kindness to your calendar. Just squeeze it in there along with everything else.
But time is tricky, isn’t it? Family life is chaotic. Most weeks it feels impossible to add anything new to the calendar. Yet in between paying bills, attending soccer games, and helping with homework, we long for meaningful moments to connect with our kids. We long for interesting ways to teach them our values.
Above all, we want to help them grow into caring, engaged adults.
Thankfully, Doing Good Together will help you overcome the chaos and make time for what’s important. We offer very specific, very doable ideas to help you simultaneously:
- Create meaningful, joyful memories with your children,
- Make a real difference for someone in need, and
- Teach kindness, compassion, and generosity.
DGT offers a subscriber’s list in fact, and, with a simple email sign-up, you’ll get a monthly list of family volunteer opportunities right here in the Twin Cities, plus our popular e-newsletter full of book ideas and at-home projects that can get your family started doing good, together, right away.
Over the years, Doing Good Together has inspired my family to do so many amazing projects.
I recently asked my daughters to share their favorite DGT projects with me. My nine-year-old reminded me of the time we hosted a neighborhood book drive for soldiers serving abroad with Operation Paperback. My crafty six-year-old loved designing special placemats for Meals-on-Wheels recipients. And they are both looking forward to next Valentine’s Day, when we’ll host our fourth annual card-making party for a local nursing home.
Some of the projects we’ve taken on have become such a part of our regular family routine, my kids don’t think of them as service projects. When there is a lull, we often find ourselves:
- Creating cards for children in the hospital
- Picking up trash in the park
- Baking goodies to share with neighbors who need a smile
- Sharing books and letters with our pen pal in the Family-to-Family One-Book-At-A-Time program
DGT’s Big-Hearted Families™ program offers basic project instructions for these and dozens of other simple service projects, complete with discussion questions. Over the years, I’ve learned that reflection is as important as action.
Even on the busiest weeks, there is always time for a conversation.
Because we’ve turned to Doing Good Together again and again for creative project ideas, book suggestions, and conversation starters, stepping in and being a helper has become second nature to both of my daughters (my three-year-old son remains a wild card, we’re working on him!).
My daughters initiate their favorite projects when the mood strikes. They leave gifts for our mail carrier and write thank you cards for their servers at restaurants. When they hear of an injustice, whether it involves a friend at school or a country thousands of miles away, they passionately look for a way to make a difference.
Doing Good Together is not simply a nonprofit with useful tools. It’s a family mission statement, a purpose, and I’m excited to invite everyone in the Twin Cities Mom Blog community to join the cause.
Make a commitment to teach compassion. I promise, if you get started today, right now by putting one act of kindness on your calendar, you’ll be surprised by the result. (We’ll count signing up for the DGT e-newsletter as this week’s small step!)
Yes, we are all “too busy. ” Yes, there is an infinite menu of exciting ways to spend family time together. And yes, it may feel a bit saccharine to dedicate a portion of your week to literally being a “do gooder.”
But that feeling of connecting with your children, doing something meaningful together away from the whirlwind that is modern life, will be the highlight of your week.
The good you do for others and the important lessons you learn along the way will simply be wonderful side-effects to the memories you create.
Sarah Aadland, MPP, Directs DGT’s Big-Hearted Families™ Program and writes about her family’s kindness practice on the organization’s blog.
