This post originally appeared at Shareable.net.  

Ahh, Thanksgiving, a day dedicated to community, abundance and gratitude. In an ideal world, this could be the theme of every day, but we all know how it goes: life is a fast-moving train and expressions of gratitude oftentimes get left at the station. Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to give thanks and to give back. Below are some ideas for having a community-driven, gratitude-inducing, Shareable Thanksgiving.

Share Food  

Invite people you'd like to get to know better to share a Thanksgiving meal. How to Host a Stranger Dinner offers advice on how to organize it.

Put your meal to music, throw a Thanksgiving concert in your home. How to Host a House Concert provides the how-to’s.

Meals on Wheels serves over one million meals a day to seniors in need. Volunteer to deliver to someone in your community.

Volunteer to help at a soup kitchen. DoSomething.org has some ideas on how to get started.

Host a potluck, Thanksgiving-style. How to Reinvent the Potluck provides tips on using a potluck as a means of planning more sharing and community-building projects.

Some areas have community meals, open to anyone who wants to spend Thanksgiving with their community at-large. These gatherings are a great way to meet your neighbors, connect with your community and share in the abundance of the holiday. Contact your city officials or search the web to see if there's a Thanksgiving community meal in your town.

Share Skills & Stuff 

Have a skill you’d like to offer to others? This skills-based volunteer program connects those who have something specific to offer (carpentry, coding, gardening, graphic design etc.) with those who can benefit from a particular skill-set.

Many homeless people have limited access to personal care items. This Thanksgiving, Family-to-Family’s Stuff a Shirt for the Homeless campaign is encouraging people fill a new or lightly-used bag or shirt with supplies including toothpaste, soap and shampoo. There is also a need for baby bags, with diapers, wipes and clean clothes. The organization will help you find a drop-off point near you.

Many are still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy. Volunteers are needed to help with everything from clothing and food drives to drywall removal and debris clean-up. New York Cares and the HandsOn Network are two of the many organizations that are coordinating volunteer efforts.

Help out at a homeless shelter. The National Coalition for the Homeless has extensive resources and a database to find a shelter near you.

Many volunteer opportunities are based on local needs. Check with organizations in your area to find out what you can do to help your community with its immediate needs.

Use Thanksgiving as a springboard into year-round volunteer work. VolunteerMatch connects volunteers with a number of nonprofits and community programs.

Practice Gratitude 

Thanksgiving is the perfect opportunity to introduce the idea of gratitude to children. The Imagination Tree has arts and craft ideas to get the gratitude ball rolling. The UC Berkeley News Center offers ways to teach kids gratitude instead of entitlement. How to Teach Your Kid to Share has some interesting ideas and resources related to sharing, community and abundance.

Take time to think, feel and express gratitude. Need a prompt? Four Reasons to Thank Everyone in Your Life provides a great jumping off point.

And Explore Other Ways to Share During Thanksgiving 

Shareable’s How To Share guide has lots of resources and how to’s on sharing, a number of which can be modified for Thanksgiving.

Tell us how you're having a Shareable Thanksgiving in comments. And enjoy the holiday!

Image by David Goehring, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Dan Bergeron seems to have done the impossible: he's found a way to make pedestrians on busy sidewalks look at homeless people. His life-sized, full-body shots of men and women appealing to passersby with handmade signs have been pasted to walls on the streets of Toronto. The people look real, though they are merely black and white reproductions of real people. The signs are the message, and read "I'd rather die than be homeless another winter" and "The system is broken. I am not."

The artist explains the project to Wooster Collective:

The project is called "the Unaddressed" and it focuses on the under-housed, giving voice to their personal opinions. Over the course of 3 months I met with 18 individuals who are currently or have recently been homeless. Through meeting, talking about their lives and discussing issues that were important to them, they developed their announcements and created a cardboard sign to reveal them. By photographing homeless and formerly homeless individuals holding cardboard signs that announce their concerns, the hope is challenge preconceived notions of homelessness and make the passers-by realize how serious the situation is and that everybody deserves the same basic necessities of life and to be treated the same way. Basically do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Source: Wooster Collective