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One of my favorite projects I’ve EVER done is the Global Children’s Book Club. Spurred by pervasive individual and systemic racism in the world, I felt the best place to start was with education. I knew that to be better advocates, we needed to seek to understand. It was an amazing opportunity and the opportunity is ripe to continue those learnings with global service ideas for kids.
Over the summer, I put together a program of 26 picture books about 26 countries – one for each letter of the alphabet. We had an amazing alphabet printable passport designed by Hadley Designs, and posts about each country with book read alouds, crafts, recipes, videos, movement activities, and more.
It was absolutely incredible seeing the good it did in your families. It allowed our family and yours to expand perspectives, and foster empathy and compassion. And it was a starting point for us to work on some implicit biases that we hold and progress in our anti-racism journey.
2020 has certainly been a unique and often challenging year. I feel strongly that there’s a special need to focus on service and goodness, both for those within our orbits and also those in orbits that we can work to expand.
I knew we all needed an extra bit of fun and adventure for our families as we stay at home, and we needed a way to move the focus outside of ourselves. We needed some new and innovative service ideas for kids.
So I decided to put together a special countdown, service-style!
I knew I wanted to do something special to loop the Global Children’s Book Club back in for the holiday season. While many of us hold different religious beliefs, we all care about connecting to the world and its people.
The abundance of holidays concerned with connecting families and friends during this time seemed to lend itself perfectly to an opportunity to learn about opportunities for service in the world. It’s a great time of year to focus on service to others and a wonderful opportunity to light the world with good deeds and support organizations doing good!
I’ve always loved advent-style activities – doing one small thing each day until a certain date to create a big mental and emotional and sometimes physical impact over time. Small and simple learnings, small and simple acts, small and simple service ideas for kids.
The framework for the Global Service Advent will be slightly different than that for the Global Children’s Book Club. Instead of moving through countries alphabetically, we’ll move by continent!
For four weeks starting on November 30th, we’ll visit a continent each week, featuring 5 countries in each. Many of these will be repeats from the Global Children’s Book Club, but a few will be new. Each will feature an organization doing good in that country, and opportunities to serve there.
The reason for this structure is because there was SO much wonderful learning in each of the countries that it’s hard to “visit” each in a single day. Since many of you have already virtually traveled to the book club countries, it will be super fun to “re-visit” and just learn about opportunities for service and doing good in those places. And it will be fun to add a few new countries into the mix!
We’ll also have an extra special printable again designed by the amazing Becca at Hadley Designs. If you’ve used her printable passport before, you know how talented she is. It’s going to be the ultimate global service advent calendar filled with ways to keep track of all the service opportunities in various countries.
For an extra fun element, we’ll have daily giveaways from different brands on Instagram for each of the 25 days of service around the world. In order to enter to win the gift of the day, anyone can donate at least $1 to the nonprofit helping in the featured country of the day.
You may either donate directly and DM me a screenshot of your receipt, or you may donate through us via Venmo or PayPal (info in Instagram Stories). If you choose to donate through us, we will personally match those donations.
Here are the days that we will “visit” each country and learn about needs, organizations doing good, and service ideas for kids in your own homes. And, of course, you can always refer back to the original country blog posts (all linked here) to learn about the country if you haven’t already! (There will be new full posts for each of the countries we haven’t “visited” previously.)
November 30th: Guatemala
December 1st: Brazil
December 2nd: Colombia
December 3rd: Venezuela
December 4th: Ecuador
December 7th: India
December 8th: Thailand
December 9th: South Korea
December 10th: Japan
December 11th: Cambodia
December 14th: Nigeria
December 15th: Morocco
December 16th: Kenya
December 17th: Zimbabwe
December 18th: Ethiopia
December 21st: France
December 22nd: Hungary
December 23rd: Greece
December 24th: Ukraine
December 25th: Service at home – serve your own family!
It’s going to be a blast! The full posts with all the organizations to support and the service ideas for kids, not to mention the printable global service advent calendar, will all be released next week.
In the meantime, feel free to let me know if you have any questions. I can’t wait!!
