Five Reasons to Serve
What Doing for Others Does for Ourselves
by Nipun Mehta
At the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, a few tech-savvy friends and I walked into a homeless shelter to give without any strings 
attached. Our motivation? We just wanted to serve, and quickly discovered that such a practice of selfless giving is something that we all have access to, no matter who we are or what we do.
Our trip to the homeless shelter led to us building a website for them at no charge. That experiment in giving blossomed into an organization called ServiceSpace, which went on to develop and gift websites to thousands of small nonprofits. But the ripples didn’t stop there. ServiceSpace has now evolved into a remarkable incubator for dozens of projects, including an online good news portal, “Smile Cards” that spread kindness, and a gift-economy restaurant in Berkeley and rickshaw in India — all touching millions of people. (more…)
