As part of our 75th Anniversary, we have given each of our team members $75 to go out into the community and commit some acts of kindness!

One of our team has already commented, “It is a weird thing that happens as you go from a brief moment of stressing about intruding on strangers in a line to wanting to look after everybody! It feels awesome!”

This is exactly the response we were hoping for. Our team is full of caring, compassionate people who just naturally take care of those around them, but some of us can be a bit shy when it comes to ‘doing good’ for complete strangers…so we thought it would be fun to encourage them to try, and watch how easy it becomes.

Our first two participants were Art and Thomas.

Thomas chose two excellent ways to spread some good cheer through Random Acts of Kindness this month:

No late fees for you!

Thomas said, “My family and I were at the Waterloo Public Library and we left them $30 to pay off any late fees that people might have after us. I also explained about our celebration: the librarian (Kelly) definitely knew of our company, and thought the act was really nice.”

Who doesn’t LOVE a free fritter!?

Saturday morning we spent the other $45 at the St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market where we often go, and bought a bunch of people apple fritters!

Here are a few highlights of the RAK experience from Art:

Road Side Assistance, just call ART!

Today as I made my way back to work, I came across a delivery guy from Brampton stuck in the snow. I stopped to help him and watched six cars go by as I took a heap of snow splashing from his spinning wheels! A snow plow came by and stopped and the two of us were able to get him on his way, but not before selling him on all the benefits of winter tires vs his bald all-seasons. It was random, it was kind, but I would be doing that kind of thing regardless of our 75th! 🙂

Giving the gift of coffee, at Starbucks

I treated these three women to whatever they were ordering. In the photo are Gabi, Joanne and Melissa. All three were very grateful and it made their day to receive such a random gift. Gabi told me she loves our company as her and her husband are planning a renovation and had been looking at our website. She insisted on a photo as well to show her kids as they would not believe her if she came home with this story. Melissa is an artist…I think our paths will cross again as she is doing some neat work that I could see our clients being interested in for a feature wall or something!

So fun to do this!

Acts of Kindness at KW hospital

There was a woman struggling as she rummaged through her purse because her hands were quite full so I offered to pay for her parking and she asked why I would do this. I told her about our 75th and wanting to give back to this great community we work and live in and that all of our staff would be empowered to do this throughout the year. She just kept asking why, who would do this? I paid for her parking, wished her well and went on my way.

This one was fun… I asked this woman if I could pay for her parking, her first question was “are you a Christian?”  to which I responded yes. She wanted to know if I was doing this through a Christian organization and when I told her it was our business she was blown away! She went on to tell me that she is a Church Minister and that she once pastored the Koinania Church in Conestogo. I know a lot of folks there and we got into a great conversation around the mutual connections we had, she then went on to praise Menno S. Martin Contractor for putting such a high value on people. As we parted ways she wished me God’s blessing. Again a very cool experience!

More fun to come all year long! We hope our stories inspire you to be randomly kind! Waterloo region is chalk full of great people, and we are so proud to be a part of it.

You can follow our 75th Anniversary adventures on social media too:
Twitter: @renosbymenno
Facebook: @MennoS.MartinContractor
Instagram: @renosbymenno