December 23, 2019. By Jennifer Wolfsberg:
Year-end is always a reflective time, and our team has enjoyed looking back at our philanthropic experiences throughout the year. As you may recall, our charitable initiative for 2019 was to dedicate office hours each month to volunteering and spreading awareness of the great organizations in our community. With a similar mission in 2018, we chose causes that were close to us personally. Through that process, we learned more about our team and what matters most to them outside of the office. This year, we dedicated our time to organizations and causes that were referred to us by clients and professionals that we work alongside. By making this our charitable mission for the 2019, we were able to learn about many wonderful community efforts that we may not have otherwise been privy to. To name a few, our team had the pleasure of volunteering with Gifts to Give in New Bedford, the Natural Resource Trust in Easton, and several local universities both guest-teaching classes and mentoring.
Our charitable initiative for 2020 will focus on something that is very close to all of us and will likely be quite a bit of fun as well. Throughout the year we will be supporting Creative Little Leaders, an up-and-coming non-profit group with the mission of inspiring gratitude, kindness, and resilience in creative little leaders everywhere through compassionate community action. Our Associate Director of Relationship Development, Ashley Agnew, is on the advisory board for Creative Little Leaders, and her enthusiasm for the mission has spread through to our team, leaving us all excited to become more involved in spreading kindness this upcoming year:
“We are all built to foster and harbor kindness, compassion, and gratitude however the expression of these feelings that can get lost in the shuffle of daily life. As adults, we may not be modeling these as outwardly as we are experiencing them, and our little ones naturally process what they are seeing, not necessarily what we are feeling. Creative Little Leaders gives families a chance to exhibit all of these wonderful expressions of gratitude and kindness, all with an element of creativity and leadership to teach invaluable coping and resiliency skills that are better taught through action than words. Creative Little Leaders gives children the opportunity to be in charge of spreading kindness in their community, and the skills to teach others to do the same.”
The founder of Creative Little Leaders, Kelly Gagliardi, started the organization with the hope of populating media outlets with more positive reports:
“Social media has become more depressing than connective, and news reports on television and radio are unfortunately often so tragic. These happenings cannot be ignored of course, but seeing the look in my daughter’s eyes when she sees such awful reports…it is just devastating. This look inspired me to do my best to make a kinder world for her, and to teach her how to inspire her peers despite their young age.”
The organization has already distributed over 500 “LWK” gift bags to incentivize their Lead With Kindness Challenge, which provides recipients with all the tools they need to spread kindness throughout their immediate community through simple, random acts. Creative Little Leaders is currently distributing their Kindness Curriculum which has been highly sought after and requested by several school districts in the South Coast and Farm Coast of Massachusetts. With support and continued growth, Creative Little Leaders will be strengthening children all over New England, and hopefully filling our newsfeeds with more positive stories than negative.
A quote that we often share from Dr. Tara Cousineau will certainly be applicable to our initiative this year as well: “When people are kindhearted, generosity spreads”. We look forward to keeping you posted with our involvement with Creative Little Leaders throughout 2020. In the meantime, we wish our clients, colleagues, friends, and families a happy and safe holiday season, and we thank the organizations who opened their doors to our volunteers in 2019. Kindly note that as we wrap up the year, we will be closing the office at 1pm on December 24th, resuming normal business hours on the 26th, in observance of the holidays and to celebrate with our loved ones.