From the Brattleboro Reformer: "Students from Putney Central School converged on the athletic field to form a heart as part of the school’s recent Kindness Week. Throughout the week, students and staff engaged in celebrating the countless ways to show kindness as a school community." Read this quick story on kindness in schools.

An extra Compassion Story this month! Laiba Eager writes "Until this year, I’d never spent even a month away from my mother. Now I had flown across the seven seas to an adventure I could never have imagined. It would have been sufficient to experience a new family, a new school, and new friends. But I never imagined that I would have an experience of Ramadan here in Brattleboro that would be so memorable."

Brattleboro’s Sister Community, Marygold Village (MGV), revolves around what had been a leprosy village in Hemachandrapuram, Telangana, India. This interview is with Teresa Savel, Brattleboro Ambassador to Marygold Village.

The latest Compassion Story is an interview with Helen Schultz from the Haiti Orphanage Sponsorship Trust. Brattleboro's sister city in Haiti is in dire straits and this interview explores what's happening and what people in Brattleboro can do to help.

This Compassion Story is the 5th in our series looking at our sister communities. Rob and Jeanne Walk of Olean, NY are interviewed and discuss how the Charter for Compassion impacts their community, the resettlement of refugees from Honduras, and how their group got started. Learn more about how Olean is taking action for compassion.

We were so glad to read this piece in The Reformer by Stephen Rice who shares the ways in which refugee families and their children have been welcomed in area schools. He writes: "Once the students started going to school, the sense of a warm embrace was extended by the entire school population, from the classroom teachers who welcomed and fully included each child in instruction as well as their classroom communities, to the students who reached out and befriended them and created room signs in Dari or Pashto languages, to the administrators who extend- ed offers of support and created spaces for the children to privately observe their noontime prayers, to the coordinators of after school programs who eagerly included the children in their activities."

Compassionate Brattleboro thanks Barbara Jarvis for her kind letter to the editor in which she expressed her appreciation for the group. It's always nice to be appreciated and acknowledged! 

The latest Compassion Story takes a closer look at one of Brattleboro's sister communities: Tsidi To'ii, which is part of the Navajo Nation. Miriam Dror writes that "Each of Brattleboro’s sisters offers the possibility of opening our eyes and our hearts to a larger world of humanity and nature. As mainstream Americans, it can be so easy for us to lose touch with the larger circle of cultures and conditions. Compassionate Brattleboro has been intent on expanding the joy of interrelatedness and compassion both up close within our own community and with our ever-enlarging and richly engaging relationships with others. We are thankful to our sister communities for providing us with the chance to experience this ever-growing understanding and this loving reciprocity." Learn more about the Dine' by reading this Compassion Story.