With the holidays coming up quickly next week, Rox thought it would be a nice idea to highlight Yahoo! because they are getting in the holiday spirit with their new campaign “You In?”  The campaign wants to use the power of social media to encourage people to do a good deed for someone else and then post it to kindness.yahoo.com.

Yahoo! believes that the holiday season brings out the best in people and if you experience an act of kindness then you are more likely to pass it on.  And with the viral capabilities of social media, this could be a global phenomenon.   Whether it is paying someone else’s toll or donating your time to charity, Yahoo! wants you to post the good deed to their site.  The deeds are tallied when they are posted and displayed on an interactive global map to track the effects of kindness all over the world.

To date more than 146,000 people have posted their acts of kindness to the website.  We want to hear about our Rox readers acts of kindness! Reply to the post so we can share your good deeds with the rest of our community.

For more information on the project, go to: http://adage.com/goodworks/post?article_id=141092

Service Rox for the fourth time this year! This quarter we bundled ourselves up and headed down to South County Outreach in Lake Forest to help families in need. Some of us sorted, stacked, and shelved food for families in the warehouse-sized food pantry. Others went into the toy warehouse and put together gift bags for children of all ages. Inside, we were told stories of hardships, giving, and kindness by the staff. All of which were very inspiring. Roxburgh would like to thank everyone at South County Outreach. We appreciate everything they do for families in our community and for welcoming us so warmly. Rox staff left grateful and inspired!
For more information about South County Outreach please visit http://www.sco-oc.org/

For the 3rd time this year, Roxburgh staffers ventured out into the community to help those in need.  Each quarter, three names are drawn to put together a community service program for the period.  This quarter, the team chose Someone Cares Soup Kitchen in Costa Mesa.  We put our hair back, donned aprons and broke out the kitchen knives.  We chopped, grated, peeled, mixed, blackened and boiled the afternoon away.  It was a team effort and hundreds were served in the process.  Many thanks to Someone Cares Soup Kitchen for serving our community on a daily basis and allowing Roxburgh to come in and be a part of that. We are thankful and appreciative.
Visit http://www.someonecareskitchen.org/ for more information on Someone Cares Soup Kitchen.

On June 19th, the whole Rox crew arrived bright and early at the Kinship Center in Santa Ana in our toughest work clothes to literally clean house. (One of our creative director’s husbands even showed up to help with some of the heavy stuff – Thanks, Ed.) This wonderful nonprofit agency is dedicated to finding loving, stable homes for children from birth to age 17, and has helped create and support families for thousands of children since 1984. We were so humbled by the dedication of everyone there.

After getting the warmest of welcomes by staff and fed a delicious continental breakfast, we broke off into teams to scrub bathrooms and kitchen facilities, reorganize closets, haul unwanted items off to dumpsters and just generally clean up anything needing it. You see, the Kinship Center doesn’t have a budget for this kind of cleaning, so much more important tasks take priority and they just live with the things that don’t get done.

By the time we left, things were in ship-shape condition, and the staff was speechless. I guess you could say we’re pretty damn good at getting down and dirty, and in all modesty a whole lot more thorough than those big bucks cleaning services.

For more info on Kinship Center, visit kinshipcenter.org. They can use all the help they can get!

This year, Rox has launched a program called Service Rox. The overall program is for the good of our clients, our friends and our community. This section is dedicated to our quarterly philanthropic adventures. Each quarter, we put a team of 3 together to plan a community service event and this quarter, we served, and I mean SERVED, on January 21, MLK Day. The lot of us hauled our buns down to the Volunteer Center Orange County in Garden Grove and packed food boxes for the hungry. Now, many of us had never done this type of service before, so packing food boxes didn’t sound too difficult, but I am here to tell you that we got whooped and it felt good, mind, body and soul. It was hard work and well worth it. Our line packed nearly 1,200 food boxes that day, more than double the other food lines during our shift, time well spent. I highly recommend that everybody give community service a try, you’ll want to do it again and again.

For more information on Volunteer Center Orange County, visit their website at www.volunteercenter.org.