Today, November 13, is World Kindness Day. If you’re looking for new perspectives on the spiritual rejuvenation to be found in helping others, check out the Cosimo book The Power of Purpose Awards, a project of the John Templeton Foundation. In this collection of award-winning essays, you will share an umbrella with a monk, root for a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, cheer on the efforts of an elderly woman struggling to learn to read and write, scrub down a bathroom for “colored” in the 1950s segregated South, and play a memory/listening game with the elderly. And much more. The essays explore the many ways we can find purpose when helping other people on a personal level, nurturing the environment, or when working with others toward a larger goal. While their subjects are diverse, their message is simple: finding one’s purpose is finding one’s meaning, one’s “divine spark.” In helping others, we help ourselves.

Proceeds from The Power of Purpose Awards benefit The Hunger Project, a global, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. The Hunger Project has mobilized clusters of rural villages around the planet to create and run their own programs that achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.

Looking for more ways to be kind? Search for charities — and everything else — at Good Search, a search engine that donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities, and schools designated by its users.

The Power of Purpose Awards is available at Amazon and other online booksellers.

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