Contagious Giving

Team: Roger & Dionne

Giving yourself is not only fun and rewarding (on a variety of levels but certainly emotionally and spiritually) … it is contagious. Our Give Yourself program has resulted in two generous gestures that connected us with clients and friends.

The wonderful folks at Nickelodeon Family Suites Resortread about what we are doing and called to say they would like to donate 300 SpongeBob/Nick Hotel lunch boxes if we could find one of the charities we are working with that could use them.

Marketing Coordinator Laura Nipe loaded box loads of the colorful lunch boxes in her truck on a busy Friday afternoon and braved rush hour traffic to bring them to our office and the next day we had 120 of them in the hands of our friends at B.A.S.E. Camp, an organization that helps children with cancer and their families. On Sunday, every child who attended B.A.S.E. Camp’s annual Christmas Party received a lunch box in addition to many other toys and gifts made possible by the charity and its many donors.

Thanks to Laura and Nick Hotel V.P. Jim Olson for catching the spirit of Give Yourself. You made those kids very happy … but there’s more. Two days later Dionne Aiken and I joined B.A.S.E. Camp Program Coordinator and Parent Cindy Whitaker at Florida Hospital in the Disney Children’s Cancer Center for B.A.S.E. Camp’s weekly pizza delivery and as we passed out pepperoni, sausage, cheese, barbecue and Hawaiian pies we made sure the patients and their siblings also got a shiny new SpongeBob lunch box. What a treat!

In between all this, however, came a call from longtime friend and local marketing guru Richard Jackson, saying “listen, I’ve got some time during the holidays and I’m looking for some local charities where I could maybe lend some time and do some good.”

Always a community volunteer at heart, it took Richard no time at all when I told him about our pizza delivery plans to ask “hey, can I join you?” Father of beautiful nearly grown kids himself, I could see the joy on Richard’s face as we interacted with some kids who have every reason I can think of not to be in the Christmas spirit but who, instead, brought big smiles to all of us as we shared pizza and lunch boxes.

If you haven’t had time yet, there’s no seasonal limit on Giving Yourself. You can do it all year long. Go Give Yourself! And, Merry Christmas.