“You In?” program encourages acts of good during the holiday season

Bob Hope once said, “If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”

Truer words were seldom spoken. At Yahoo!, we strive not only to not be evil, we want to do a little good. That’s why, during this year’s season of sharing, we’ve launched the year-end giving campaign “You In?”.
The campaign, designed to send a cascade of kindness throughout the Yahooniverse and beyond, is an extension of our Yahoo! for Good Purple Acts of Kindness program, and aims to encourage you, the most valuable part of our global community of 600 million, to give back a little of your good fortune through random acts of kindness—and encourages others to do the same.

And without necessarily spending a dime.

Here’s how it works. First, go to kindness.yahoo.com and enter your random act of kindness. You might have dropped off a raincoat at a homeless shelter, or donated a sawbuck to fight breast cancer, or sent a holiday greeting card to a disabled veteran, or simply just remembered to say “happy holidays” to the bus driver. You get the idea.

Once you’ve submitted your act, it will automatically appear on your Yahoo! Status and can be shared on your Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace pages. It will also be displayed on an interactive global map on the campaign’s website at kindness.yahoo.com.

For example, your post might say, “I just helped an elderly person with a walker cross the street. You In?” and provide a link so others can join in and share their own acts of kindness.

So get in, give well and ask others, “You In?” It’s a great way to give Scrooge the what-for during a tough season. To get you in the mood, here are a few more quotes from the great and good:

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”—Mark Twain

“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.”—Seneca

“The more sympathy you give, the less you need.”—Malcolm S. Forbes

—The Team

(Special thanks to Quote Garden for the inspiring words above; image courtesy Ed Youdon via Flickr, CC 2.0)