For one week, February 15 to 24, Ottawa is choosing to be kind. The city will be celebrating, encouraging, and even keeping a web journal to showcase the simple acts of kindness brought to life throughout the community this week.
The new kindness organization, the brain child of a local rabbi, is seeking nominations of people, workplaces and organizations deserving recognition for kindness.
“Ottawa’s bus service OC Transpo is donating a bus to carry a “Kindness Crew” of university students who have volunteered to travel around the city to commit “surprise acts of kindness,” such as helping shovel snow and carry groceries.
For people “caught” committing random acts of kindness, Ottawa police will give out “Kindness Citations” that can be redeemed for a treat at Ottawa’s well-loved Rideau Bakery.
And during the week there will be more than 200,000 “Kindness Cards” in circulation in the region…”
Visit the KindOttawa.ca website
Thanks to Sarah C. in NY for sending this inspiring story!
A good ball to get rolling for sure!! A good reflection of the kindness that is abundant in Canada (where I’m currently living as I travel the world), and of doing and recognising the good opposed to denying the bad.
Now lets add on an extra week a year 😉
Viva la Canada
What a great concept. Wouldn’t it be nice if a Tourist Board ran ads for the city using that to attract visitors, I think ut would be a bid draw.
Here is a recent One Minute Motivator I wrote that ties into the kindness theme:
“According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, an experimental psychologist at UC Riverside doing a considerate thing for another person five times in one day made the doer happier than if they had spread out those five acts over one week. Lyubomirsky explains that because we all perform acts of kindness naturally, it seems to please us more when we’re more conscious of it. So go out today and practice random acts of kindness while being aware that you are doing it. You will make yourself happier, someone else happier and of course, a better world.”
Anyone interested in a FREE daily email of the One Minute Motivator can go to http://www.brightmoment.com and enter your email, or see them on youtube at: http://youtube.com/user/motivationalexpert
OK thanks and keep up the good work, Ed Smith.
Yay Canada! I hope this catches on in other nations, too. Superb idea.