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Below are last week’s Tweets for CharityFocus. Spread the good!

• Last Week’s Twitter Links [more]
• DailyGood: Inmates Take Yoga to Reduce Jail Sentence [more]
• Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, on roots and details of how the festivals’ gift economy works: [more]
• Reality is broken. Jane McGonigal thinks game designers have to fix it: [more]
• Letter from UCSL Church: “CF’s extraordinary acts of generosity don’t go unnoticed in our community.” With it, a tithe of $3197.21. Wow!
• Birju shares Gandhi’s take on exercise, from his autobiography: [more] Time to go for a run!
• Millions bathe at the Ganges, during the Kumbh Mela: [more] ‘Tis perhaps the world’s largest self-organizing event.
• RT @tonicnews A $1 million stimulus program that gives free BlackBerries to smokers. What’s next? iPhones for alcoholics? [more]
• DailyGood: Birds Do It. Bats Do It. [more]
• Jo and crew just finished the music video for (Black Eyed Peas) Apl’s title track, You Can Dream: [more]
• Trailer of an upcoming movie of a local hero, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon Papers in 60s — Most Dangerous Man: [more]
• “The world will be saved by the Western woman.” –Dalai Lama, at the 2009 Peace Summit in VanCouver
• Avg. American eat 140 lbs of sugar per year! Great article on the fundamentals of Diabetes and how to avoid it: [more]
• DailyGood: The Zero Rupee Note [more]
• RT @Help0thers: Random Acts of Kindness Week - want to do something kind but can’t think of what to do? You’re in luck! [more]
• Obese people cluster together in social networks. So do smokers, alcoholics, divorcees and altriusts. [more]
• One of the most powerful #KarmaTube videos yet. Moments by Will Hoffman: [more]
• Met an amazing sculptor, ex-army captain who was first in My Lai who is sure that “Ultimately, it’s love.” Gale Wagner: [more]
• The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution: [more]
• Oprah interviews 83 year old Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh: [more]
• DailyGood: A Gym Powered By Sweat [more]
• Does winning the lottery make you happy? [more]
• Madhu & Meghna, on India Today cover-story: [more] “It all started with a gift” & now it’s a film-for-social-change revolution!
• RT @Help0thers: A 51-year-old embraced the Valentine’s Day spirit , giving 7,777 hugs in 24 hours for a new world record: [more]
• According to a new survey, Silicon Valley & San Francisco are amongst America’s happiest big metro-regions: [more]
• DailyGood: No Laptops Allowed At This Cafe [more]
• The Rules of Generosity: why do people give more generously to earthquake victims than to prevent deaths from poverty? [more]
• From the makers of Inconvenient Truth, comes the upcoming Countdown to Zero: [more]
• HelpOthers: A Treasured Gift For A Young Couple [more]
• DailyGood: 5 Ways to Start a Kindness Revolution at Work [more]
• RT @Help0thers: Looking for a daily dose of inspiration to share your kindness with others? Welcome to Kindness Daily [more]
• A CEO celebrates his 81st birthday by gifting his entire $20 million natural food company to his employees: [more]
• “You know what? Money is just an illusion,” Ben Bernanke opened at the Senate. Hilarious(!) spoof on The Onion: [more]
• RT @trishnashah What makes couples happy? What makes marriages last? Turns out, it’s all about the small acts of love: [more]
• DailyGood: Fastest Growing Minor at Cal [more]
• RT @docuguy Lee Schneider features CharityFocus on HuffingtonPost: [more] Thanks, Lee!
• In a pay-it-forward social network of “collaborative capitalists,” participants start by asking, “How can I help you?” [more]
• 100 most influential books of our time: [more] BBC notes that most people have only read 6 of them!
• I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness. –Mother Teresa
• HelpOthers: Turning Kindness Into A Habit [more]
• DailyGood: Canada’s Bravery Awards [more]

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Below are last week’s Tweets for CharityFocus. Spread the good!

• Last Week’s Twitter Links [more]
• DailyGood: Our World May Be a Giant Hologram [more]
• As Borders closes 200 stores, 50K books were to be destroyed; due to public protest, now they’ll be donated: [more]
• Ogori Cafe’s unique service — you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you order: [more]
• This week’s #iJourney passage is amply called, “Forgiveness & Your Life’s Unfinished Business,” by Stephen Levine. [more]
• Latest from @goproject — Hands, Head, Heart theme, inspired by CF/Jayesh Patel: [more]
• DailyGood: Ogori Cafe: Order It Forward! [more]
• ‘Value isn’t the same as price. All value is discovered inside a conversation where neither side can dictate a price and walk away.’ –Rajni
• RT @oneworldcitizen #Gandhi on ‘Scarcity in the Midst of Abundance’: [more]
• 95 percent of user-generated comments to blogs, chat rooms and message boards are bogus: [more]
• Cafe owner in Oakland is asking customers to leave their laptops at home and actually speak to each other: [more]
• When is it OK to give money to beggars? Here’s a lesson learned from the beggars of India: [more]
• While we’ve never broadcast our FB Fan Page — [more] — it’s great to see word-of-mouth carry it past 1K fans. Thank you!
• DailyGood: Seeing How Far $100 Can Go [more]
• A Day In 1914 When Soldiers Stopped Fighting [more]
• This year, they cost $6M per minute. But still, Superbowl ads continue to be sexist: [more]
• RT @DeepakChopra Gallup poll: having a good day is what leads to having a good life. [more]
• Sam and Leah’s Shopping Cart-ography is getting some attention! Make a Map of Where Your Goods Come From: [more]
• True power comes from the ability to share, but once we have that power, we tend not to share. Power Paradox: [more]
• Who do we trust less? Us. In the age of friending, research shows that consumers trust their friends less: [more]
• What kind of information travels the fastest — good news or bad? Survey says … GOOD news! [more]
• “Of 140K iPhone apps, odds of being exposed to more than 1K are very small.” @fredhsu’s DailyGood app has crossed 2K! [more]
• Just learned that Neema was the mastermind behind Microsoft’s Mouse Mischief: [more]
• DailyGood: Grannies With A Mission [more]
• After a series of tests, a long time customer confirms he’ll donate a kidney for the cashier’s needed transplant: [more]
• These days, knowing what you’re talking about isn’t what it used to be. In crowdsourcing era, loudness beats expertise? [more]
• RT @cshirky Iran shuts down Gmail, announces “National Email Service” [more]
• Taking the “I” Out of Marriage? Couples who say “we” have more satisfying, less stressful relationships: [more]
• DailyGood: Fortune That Made Him Miserable [more]
• Rickshaw Respect: The Work of Irfan Alam [more] … who incidentally has been invited by Obama: [more]
• ‘I realize that the upside to leaving my corporate job is infinite.’ Aditi points to EscapeTheCity heroes, like Kshitij: [more]
• RT @wittyone “Giving motivates you to do ever better work.” Seth Godin on hidden power of a gift: [more]
• YouTube ‘brings sexy back’ to charity work: [more] On average, about 75 new volunteer videos are made each month.
• We could free all the slaves in the world for $11B — less than we spend on chips and salsa each year. #Ted
• DailyGood: iBrain: Mobile Communication Device in Your Head [more]
• If you ran the world, what would you do (in 140 characters or less)? [more]
• HelpOthers: Five ways to start a kindness revolution at work: [more]
• Do consumers stereotype when choosing between a non-profit firm versus a profit firm? [more]
• What’s the difference between remembering happiness & actually being happy? A Nobel Prize winner explores… [more]
• Cost of sequencing the human genome has plunged from $2.3 billion in 2003 to $5 thousand … and continues to fall! [more]
• Web’s latest sensation? ChatRoulette: connect w/strangers via web-cams. Future of Internet or its distant past? [more]
• DailyGood: 10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy [more]
• “There are many rewards in thinking about complexity, not many in thinking about simplicity.” –Whiteside #Ted
• SF Chronicle reviews Jerry’s latest book — What is God? [more]
• Producer from Uruguay uploaded a short film to YouTube in Nov, and now has a $30M Hollywood contract: [more]
• Am enjoying reading the wonderful kindness stories of ‘DoNothing’: [more]
• Had lots of fun at the CF “jam” in Napa last week. Top-nine photos of ‘Few Gifts I Remember’: [more]
• Aardvark’s social-search gets acquired by Google! Damon Horowitz’s excellent talk on “why machines need people”: [more]

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Many years ago, I used to hang out with this "German guy with a nice car" and share some deep conversations about service.  It never occured to me that I should ask him about his work life.   At a random conversation, a decade later, I learned that he was the founder of Price Club (now Costco).

Being solidly anchored in your values has the perk of drawing people into the same space — and rest are details that almost don’t matter.

Since generosity is one of those anchoring values for CharityFocus, I tend to have conversations with people around precisely those small acts of goodness.  At a recent meeting with an established entrepreneur, our lunch meeting turned into a story-telling session of some rather remarkable stories …

In New York, two friends are seated at Arturo’s Pizza and they have this crazy idea.  They tell their waiter, "We’d like to pay for the whole restaurant, but anonymously."  "What?!?" the sensible waiter responds.  The restaurant owner comes in.  "Sir, I think you’ve had too much to drink," he concludes.  "Look, I need 19-20 drinks before I get drunk.  I’m really serious.  Tell everyone that someone anonymous paid covered their tab and that they should pay it forward. "  It had never happened in their 28 year history.  Almost all of a sudden, everyone in the restaurant gets happy; waiters feel like philanthropists, restaurant diners start shelling out incredible tips, and the restaurant owners are still wondering if that man is drunk. :)  Sure enough, they paid.   When they found out that their pizza wasn’t charged, they went back to cover that too.  It’s unclear how many people were drunk, but everyone was high.

And another one:

At their company, they had couple of summer interns.  To teach them about taking initiative, the CEO calls them into their office: "Our company is about spreading good in the world.  So in line with the values of our company, go out to the park and do something that’s never been before."  "Like what?" the interns protested.  "Whatever you want."  "Anything?"  Yes, anything."  "How much can we spend?"  "Any amount."  "ANY amount? "  "Yeah, if it’s $3 million, I will write you a check for $3 million."  And the CEO was serious.  The college interns thought and thought and re-thought.   "What could they do?"  Then, they hit up a local park with a "Penny For Your Thoughts" poster and created a collage of positive thoughts that random passerby’s contributed.  And they ultimately donated the collage to a local homeless shelter.  It cost $143 in all, but the interns will never forget that experience.

Couple days later, I was hanging out with Ashish, and I get an email with "oh my god" as the subject line and "call me now" as the text.   It was the same friend, calling to tell me this remarkable story:

On the streets of Downtown Mountain View, he runs into his college friend whom he hasn’t seen in years. "AJ?!?"  "It’s been so long!"  As they start to shake hands, his friend holds out a little card.  "Someone just paid for my coffee and gave me this Smile Card," and excitedly starts to explain the pay-it-forward concept.  "Man, I know all about Smile Cards — I know the people that started it!  Who gave you the card?"   "That woman right there.  She paid for my coffee and gave me the card."  Immediately, he runs up to her and asks, "M’aam, who gave you these Smile Cards?"  "Well, there was a guy in front of me who paid for my coffee and handed me a Smile Card.  Then, he gave me $60 and this stack of Smile Cards, and asked me to pay forward for all the people in the line!"  He couldn’t believe it.

It’s not that everyone is all about giving all the time. But as we sincerely try to be the change we wish to see, it attracts those little strands from each person’s journey and pretty soon, our lives are full of values we cherish.

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