Paying It Forward With Stonyfield

Editors note: This post was supposed to publish in December, but due to a technical error, it didn’t. Stonyfield provided me with a $50.00 gift card to use to pay it forward as I wished. All opinions are my own.

When Stonyfield asked me if I wanted to participate in their December pay it forward opportunity, the answer was an easy yes. I’ve been thinking long and hard lately about how I can use the gifts I’ve been given to help others.

I brainstormed for quite some time and considered a lot of different charities I loved.

I thought about buying diapers for Safe Passage, an organization that works in my area to help women in crisis domestic abuse situations. Often times these women are fleeing with their kids and what they can gather up in just a few minutes.
I thought about buying a bunch of food for my local food pantry that serves more than 100 families each year.
I thought about donating the money to the children’s department in my local library. They recently renovated and lost almost all of their children’s books when the storage room flooded.
I thought about heading to the coffee shop and paying for all of the drinks of the people behind me.

Each of these would have made an impact on someone’s day. But, what I really wanted to do was use the money in a way that was really meaningful to someone.

Recently, a family in our church had their third baby boy….. 3 babies in 5 years. I remember how hard it was to jump from one to two and I can imagine the jump from two to three, is hard. Especially when #2 is also pretty little. I remember how hard those first newborn days felt… when I needed to get to the grocery store to pick up just a few things, but doing so also meant taking the baby and big brother along too.

I decided to use my $50.00 from Stonyfield to pick up a few groceries for this family. I grabbed a mix of breakfast favorites like Stonyfield Yogurt (both for the kids and adults) and cereal, easy dinner meals and a package of diapers (not pictured). I added in milk, because we always need milk!