Act of Kindness: How to Cool Off Your Neighbors On a Hot Summer Day!

During the hottest part of the 2014 summer in Oneonta, NY, our church spent Sunday afternoons providing our community some sweet relief by giving away ice-cold drinks. In one month, we used our "kindness cart" to pass out nearly 200 drinks, and in addition to cooling people off, we warmed a lot of hearts with God's love!

"Would You Like a Free Cold Drink?" 

Those on Main Street who got a chance to see the kindness cart in action may have done a double take at the odd sight. After all, it's not every day that you're approached by a friendly face offering you a free soda from a cooler strapped to a dolly. And to make sure that everyone knew what we were up to, we strapped a whiteboard sign to the dolly that read "FREE COLD DRINK!"

With our kindness cart assembled and our cooler full of bottled water, cans of soda, and ice, we would then spend a few hours pushing the cart up and down Oneonta's downtown sidewalks and parks. As you can tell by this picture, we were easy to spot.

For our small church, this is an effective outreach that's both fairly inexpensive and fun to do. With our full-sized cooler, we're able to fit 40+ beverages and 2 bags of ice, and we found that a ratio of half bottled water/half cans of soda works best.

On one occasion, we had two teams of volunteers pass out cold drinks at the same time. While team #1 pushed the kindness cart up and down Main Street, the second team carried a smaller cooler in the city park that had extra drinks stowed away in a baby stroller.

How to Make Your Own Kindness Cart!

For those of you feeling inspired to make your own kindness cart and bless your community with cold drinks on a hot summer day, we've made for you this helpful image: Here's how you can make your own kindness cart in 6 easy steps!

One fun, additional step that you can do is to get creative and decorate your kindness cart. This was done by our friends from Rider University in New Jersey. In October, the student club Rider Serves, made a kindness cart for selling concessions at a sporting event in order to raise money for an animal shelter.

Post by Rider Serves.

For our church, 2013 was the first year that we tried out the kindness cart, and thanks to the large amount of people that we're able to bless with the cart in a relatively short amount of time, it has become one of our favorite summertime activities. Every time we do it we come back with stories of meeting new people, making new friends, and our faith is encouraged because the cold drinks are so well received.

Mobile Kindness

As silly as the kindness cart looks, we've learned that putting wheels to this act of kindness is what makes it work. As a church that reaches out to our community with at least one act of kindness every week, we've learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn't work. One approach to community outreach that we feel no longer works in today's postmodern culture is to host a kindness event at church, expecting the public to come to us. In particular, we've seen this approach fail with a free community dinner, and even a free oil change got little-to-no response from our community.

I think this is why Jesus' Great Commission to the church begins with the word "go." By strapping wheels to our acts of kindness and taking them to where the people are, we've experienced a dramatic increase in the number of interactions, and we get the opportunity to talk with people that may be determined to never set foot inside a church. We've found that even a person that's vocal against Christianity is genuinely touched when they're approached by an act of kindness--especially if they're super thirsty and we're offering a cold water that's free!

"And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward." --Jesus, Matthew 10:42