Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

  Some call this the season of lights. With all the lights and decorations, I can see why. Today I'm going to talk about another kind of light.   I don’t usually talk about just one website at a time in my blog. I give lots of websites that have great ideas or provide my own ideas and inspirations. But today, there is a website I want to talk about because it does A LOT! The Points of Light website caters to individual volunteers, companies that want to make a difference and to nonprofits as well. Individuals can find volunteer opportunities, causes and programs set up for them.   Nonprofits can post volunteer opportunities. The Points of Light Civic Accelerator “invests in and supports seed stage social ventures that solve pressing social and environmental issues by engaging people” also. If you have an idea for a nonprofit, this is the place to be, with money, mentoring, peer support and networking for your idea. Or, if you have a company that wan...

We recently moved to a new neighborhood. Our neighbors on one side are selling their house and haven’t talked to us one time. We met the neighbors on the other side within a week of moving, because our son was selling boy scout camp cards with coupons on them to help him raise money for summer camp. They didn’t buy a card, but they did welcome us to the neighborhood.  I’ve already written about how our old neighbors were so supportive of him and the new neighbors here were pretty great, too, buying cards and encouraging him to talk by asking him questions about scouting. Back in our old neighborhood, I had a habit of bringing cookies over to new neighbors, at least in the first few years of living there. Later, we had so many new neighbors that I stopped doing it. I think I also got tired with the apathy in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood had a community issue to deal with that never really got solved. We had a 55 year old sign in the front of the neighborhoo...