This holiday season, Yahoo! started a generosity campaign to spread kindness around the world with one simple act. To start the ripple of kindness, Yahoo! gave $100 each to 400 internal and external influencers, and I was one of them. I received a $100 check in the mail from Yahoo that arrived with these marching orders:

• Do something nice for someone!
• Pass it on
• Inspire others
• Let us know what you did

I used my $100 check to purchase holiday gifts for Next Door Solutions, an agency here in Silicon Valley that safety for battered women and their children through emergency shelter; multiple points of entry for victims; individuals, system and institutional advocacy; crisis intervention; education for victims and the community.

Every year, the agency holds a special holiday party event for clients and their children. They do a gift drive for both children and their mothers. Presents are loaded into two rooms and the children get to pick out something special for their moms and moms get to pick out something for their children.

I used my $100 check to purchase beautiful ceramic beaded necklaces from Kazuri in Kenya. Kazuri is Swahili for “small and beautiful.” The Kazuri factory is located in the rolling hills outside of Nairobi, Kenya. Here, these small handcrafted beads, made from African clay, are molded and painted by disadvantaged women of the Kikuyu Tribe.

Kazuri pays its employees three times the national wage in Kenya and provides free health care, day care, and educates workers on AIDs and Malaria. By purchasing these necklaces as gifts for women in Silicon Valley, it provides support for women in Kenya.

I got a tour of the facility where I noticed some beautiful handmade quilts hanging on the wall. I learned from Kaathleen Krenek, the executive director, that women and their children make the quilts together. She hopes to start a micro enterprise with the quilts that can help support the program and the women – something very similar to Kazuri.

My random act of kindness was to support women in San Jose by supporting women in Kenya. Your turn.

-Beth Kanter, Guest Blogger from Beth’s Blog

How does it work? A person logs into the How Good Grows site and posts a status message about something kind, generous, or caring that they’ve done. As they post, they can elect to have the status message echoed on their Yahoo!, Facebook, and Twitter feeds. Once the message is sent out into the world, the site keeps count of how many people click on each post, how many like it, and importantly, how many people were inspired to do good deeds and share new acts of kindness.  Each ring represents one degree of connection, so your ripple will grow when you share your good deed with your friends, who then share it with their friends, and so on.

Behind the Ripples of Kindness visualization is a science project, and as is our style at Yahoo! Research, it’s a big one, and run by researchers Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, who specialize in social networks and engineers Tejaswi Kasturi, Robert Messerle, and Tom Gulik. The motor running it all is called Y2O, a bottomless sharing engine we’ve built that gives every visitor to a site a unique link that they can pass on to others. Since Y2O dishes out the links, it keeps an anonymous count of how many people visit each link, which links bring people to a site, and which links lead to new links being formed. In short, because Y2O takes care of assigning new links to every new person that visits a site, Y2O can measure how much kindness you’re spreading no matter where you share it online. This means you’ll be able to watch links spread as they are passed around via Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook, emails, instant messages, blogs, forums, SMSes, or beyond.

The Science of the Internet is young, but is already teaching us about how we are connected and the kinds of content that connect us. Online, we can share stories, images, and videos with people on the other side of the planet in an instant, but we quickly lose track of a message once we send it on to another person. We don’t know if we were the last person to share that piece of information, or if we started a ripple that grew to reach millions. While humans have been sharing since there have been humans, we can now begin to see from a distance what sharing looks like.

By Daniel Goldstein, Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research

Right now, Yahoo! is encouraging people to do a random act of kindness and update their online status to get others to join in. The kindness.yahoo.com site enables people to post status messages that can be shared across social networks (Yahoo! Updates, Facebook, Twitter). People will be able to watch their ripple of kindness (i.e. donating clothes, paying taxi fares for strangers, giving food, etc.) grow on the site, as they inspire others to also do kind acts.

To help kick-start the generosity, the Yahoo! for Good team went up to San Francisco, and paid for groceries at Foods Co on Nov. 24th – one of the busiest food shopping days before Thanksgiving.  The team spent a few hours at the store and paid for people’s groceries, all of whom were eager to pass along the kindness.   Customers were amazed by the generosity and delighted about their good fortune.   In fact one customer, who works with the Dept. of Parking and Transportation, said she was not going to give out any tickets for the rest of the day!

We will continue to conduct these acts of kindness, which are inspired by Yahoo! users’ good deeds, throughout the month in various cities across the country.  For instance, on one of the busiest postal days of the year, Dec. 13th, we will be at designated post offices paying for customers’ postal fees.

We encourage you to participate in this program.  All it takes to participate is the following:

• Do something nice for someone! From buying someone’s groceries, to donating time at your local food bank, to handing out umbrellas on a rainy day.  It’s up to you!
• Inspire others. Update your status on Yahoo! with what you’ve done at http://kindness.yahoo.com.  Share your update on other social networks – the more people who click on your update or do their own kind acts, the bigger your ripple of kindness will be.  You will be able to watch the ripple you create at kindness.yahoo.com.

For more information on the Ripples of Kindness campaign, please visit kindness.yahoo.com.

How big will your ripple of kindness be?

-Erin Carlson, Sr. Director, Yahoo! for Good

By Travis Reiman, Dean of Students at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR

Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! for Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In February, we brought extra cheer to classroom teachers in Hillsboro by delivering purple flowers and gift cards for Valentine’s Day arts and crafts projects. Here’s an account from their Dean of Students.

Last Thursday, the classroom teachers here at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR got a special surpise. As vases of beautiful purple flowers were delivered, there were plenty of smiles and lots of confused looks. Is my husband just trying to be sweet??? Did I finally win the lottery??? No one has ever sent me flowers before!!!

Everyone was shocked and excited when they discovered they were the beneficiaries of Yahoo!’s Purple Acts of Kindness Program. In addition to the bouquets, all 19 classroom teachers received $100  gift cards. The gift cards were meant to be used for the school’s Valentine’s Day celebrations so that students could have an extra special day.

This special gift was a great reward for all the hard work and effort W.L. Henry’s students put into learning this year. For the teachers, this opportunity to give their students an afternoon of special arts and crafts projects, candy, gifts, and fun put huge smiles on their faces. Thanks so much, Yahoo!.

As part of Yahoo!’s “You in?” program to spread random acts of kindness, we headed out on Christmas Eve to make a positive impact on the Quincy, Washington community. We handed out 50 – (16 piece) boxes of chicken and jojo’s plus a box of fresh baked cookies to those standing in line at the local food bank. Then we loaded back up at the store with more chicken and cookies and went to the labor camps where the real need is. Most of these are located 5-10 miles out of town. We went house to house (trailer to trailer). Two ladies started crying…and one hugged my husband and me over and over. It was very touching.

Then today the guys went out with another van full of food and delivered it to some other areas we couldn’t get to on Christmas Eve. We also took bags of stuff we were told that most request at the food bank. Bread, cereal, peanut butter and beans. So we gave them a box of chicken, jojo’s and a bag with other necessities in it.

What we were so surprised to see is that many don’t have transportation to even get to the food bank in town. I think that is why they were so touched. We are going to go out and do it again tomorrow and target another area.

Also while we were waiting for chicken at Akins Deli we randomly walked around the busy store and eyed people shopping that looked like they could use a little help (monetary wise). We notified the sales clerks to charge their groceries at checkout to our account and hand them a kindness card that encourages them to “pay it forward” by doing something nice for someone else. We weren’t around to see but I heard there were 6 really happy and grateful families.

The surprising part to this whole story is that when I went up for communion on Christmas Eve at our church, our pastor said to me, “Lisa, I saw firsthand the way you and your company touched someone’s life today. Thank you for doing that. God Bless you.” I went back to my seat wondering what he was talking about. After church he told me that he was witness to one of the store charges and could see what a truly unexpected gift it was for a family that he could see desperately needed it and it touched him as well.

I wish my children could have seen the woman cry over being given chicken, jojo’s and cookies. It would have given them perspective as to how well they have it and how sometimes it’s not what or how much you give……it’s just the act of caring about those less fortunate and wanting to make a small difference in other people’s lives.

This was a truly moving experience, and I’m so thankful to be able to participate in this You In? campaign. I have NEVER been more proud to work at Yahoo!

I’m so touched to see that these random acts of kindness really are spreading around the world. Nearly 300,000 people have already added their kind acts to the map at kindness.yahoo.com. To add yours or find more inspiration, check out kindness.yahoo.com.