It has been very exciting to see our LINK serving teams coming back to serving meals from the serving line, the way we did prior to the pandemic. We can’t adequately express our gratitude for those who kept LINK’s food service happening with sack lunches during the pandemic—your generosity was awesome—but there is nothing quite like the dynamic of a serving team working together to set up the serving line and dish up good, hot meals to our guests. Smiles abound on service team members and guests alike. This work makes a big difference in the everyday lives of people in our community.

A study published in 2023 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, by researchers A. Kumar (University of Texas Austin) and N. Epley (University of Chicago), has uncovered an interesting phenomenon concerning random acts of kindness and their impact on the recipients
of those kindnesses. The researchers ran a variety of social experiments involving random kind acts, such as giving someone a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day, or paying for a stranger’s meal at a restaurant, or delivering a cupcake randomly to someone. It has been demonstrated in other studies that the act of serving another person has positive effects on the well-being of the server, including something that has been referred to as “server’s high,” but what this new study reveals is that we tend to underestimate how much our kindness impacts the one to whom we are kind.