Learning to Give, Curriculum Division of The LEAGUE

Purpose:

• To provide participants an opportunity to define “Community Trusteeship” in their own words, thus increasing their ability to understand the philosophy.

Activity :

1. Ask participants to write their own definition of “Community Trusteeship.” Allow five to ten minutes of quiet time.
   
   
2. After writing a definition, ask participants to name one thing they might do in the next 24 hours to exercise their trusteeship.
   
   
3. Ask participants to find another person with whom to share definitions and actions.
   
   
4. In the large group, ask participants to volunteer to share their definitions and their actions.

 

Processing Questions:

Write this definition of “Trusteeship” on newsprint:
Trusteeship is individual or group behavior which, on behalf of the general public, considers the needs of the entire community and seeks to serve the common good.

1. Find similar words in the Youth in Governance definition and the personal ones.
   
   
2. Ask participants what words they would add to the standard definition?
   
   
3. Ask participants if they gained a better understanding of the old adage, “Actions speak louder than words,” as they devel¬oped these words and recalled examples of actual trusteeship.

Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty

It’s a crisp winter day in San Francisco. A woman in a red Honda, Christmas presents piled in the back, drives up to the Bay Bridge toll booth. “I’m paying for myself, and for the six cars behind me,” she says with a smile, handing over seven commuter tickets. One after another, the next six drivers arrive at the toll booth, dollars in hand, only to be told, “Some lady up ahead already paid your fare. Have a nice day.”

The woman in the Honda, it turned out, had read something on an index card taped to a friend’s refrigerator: “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” The phrase seemed to leap out at her and she copied it down.

Donna spotted the same phrase spray-painted on a warehouse wall a hundred miles from her home. When it stayed on her mind for days, she gave up and drove all the way back to copy it down. “I thought it was incredibly beautiful,” she said, explaining why she’s taken to writing it at the bottom of all her letters, “like a message from above.”

Her husband liked the phrase so much that he put it up on the wall for his seventh graders, one of whom was the daughter of a local columnist. The columnist put it in the paper, admitting that though she liked it, she didn’t know where it came from or what it really meant.

Two days later, she heard from Barbara. It was in a restaurant that Barbara jotted the phrase down on a paper place mat, after turning it around in her mind for days. “That’s wonderful!” a man sitting nearby said, and copied it down carefully on his own place mat.

“Here’s the idea,” Barbara says. “Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly.” Her own fantasies include:

• Breaking into depressing-looking schools to paint the classrooms.
• Leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in the poor parts of town.
• Slipping money into a proud old woman’s purse.

Says Barbara, “Kindness can build on itself as much as violence can.” Now the phrase is spreading, on bumper stickers, on walls, at the bottom of letters and business cards. And as it spreads, so does a vision of “guerrilla goodness.”

A man might plunk a coin into a stranger’s meter just in time. A dozen people with pails and mops and tulip bulbs might descend on a rundown house and clean it from top to bottom while the frail elderly owners look on, dazed and smiling. A teenage boy may be shoveling off the driveway when the impulse strikes. What the heck, nobody’s looking, he thinks, and shovels the neighbor’s driveway too.

It’s positive anarchy, disorder, a sweet disturbance. A woman writes “Happy Holidays” to the tellers on the backs of her checks. A man whose car has just been rear-ended by a young woman, waves her away, saying, “It’s just a scratch. Don’t worry.”

Senseless acts of beauty spread:

• A woman plants daffodils along the road way, her shirt billowing in the breeze from passing cars.
• A man appoints himself a one-man vigilante sanitation service and roams the concrete hills collecting litter in a supermarket cart.
• A couple scrubs graffiti from a green park bench.

They say you can’t smile without cheering yourself up a little
— likewise, you can’t commit a random act of kindness without feeling as if your own troubles have been lightened if only because the world has become a slightly better place.

And you can’t be a recipient without feeling a shock, a pleasant jolt. If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found your bridge fare paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to do for someone else later. Wave someone on in the intersection?

Smile at a tired clerk? Or something larger, greater? Like all revolutions, guerrilla goodness begins slowly, with a single act. Let it be yours.

 

Variation:

The facilitator may want to print this article for everyone present or purchase the “Random Acts of Kindness” book.