Are you leading a group of scouts? A youth group? Organizing the local play group?  Or simply looking for creative ideas for your family? If so, check out Doing Good Together: 101 Easy, Meaningful Service Projects for Families, Schools, and Communities, written by Doing Good Together’s own Founder and Executive Director Jenny Friedman and Jolene Roehkepartian.

As fall clubs and programs get underway, we are all scrambling to plan for a few good works in the 2011-2012 school season. I’ll be posting about my own planning efforts in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, I wanted to share this useful tool with you.

This book contains 101 simple service projects complete with:

• time requirements
• age recommendations
• materials list
• straight-forward instructions,
• ideas to extend the opportunity, and
• detailed, project-specific discussion questions!

I also thoroughly appreciate the age index, which details appropriate projects for 3-year-olds all the way up to teenagers. This is a great help when I’m trying to plan a morning with Little Miss Four versus a whole-family or play group effort involving Miss First Grader and her friends.

At the moment, I’m recruiting other preschool families to participate in project number 92: Help the Hungry. This simple project requires only 5 to 10 minutes a day, during which you complete an activity from the attached calendar (count the number of pairs of shoes in your closet or the number of food items on the top shelf of your fridge), then add that number of coins to your collection jar.

Sharing this project with my daughter’s class full of 3 and 4 years old will be easy thanks to the CDROM that accompanied the book. I’ll be able to quickly print the Hunger Calendar, instructions, and talking points for other interested families.

I’ll keep you posted about how this effort at a loosely organized group project goes.

What are your favorite service project ideas, resources, or motivators (hint: Doing Good Together is an acceptable answer!)? Leave a comment here and YOU will be entered to WIN your own copy of Doing Good Together: 101 Easy, Meaningful Service Projects for Families, Schools, and Communities!

Tags: Books & Resources, Grown Up Books

About Sarah

Sarah Aadland is striving to make family volunteering a meaningful habit for her family of five. Join the conversation as she ponders what they may (or may not have) learned and looks for helpful information about raising compassionate kids.Though she plans to one day put her Masters in Public Policy back to work for social justice, she sees family volunteering as a way to build a stronger community, a better world, and a more connected family. In addition to her children, Sarah tends a large garden, a small flock of chickens, and a habit of mindfulness amid the necessary rituals of parenting.

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