I’m sure you’ve already heard that shipping delays are expected to be out of control this holiday season. I’ve been waiting for new pillows I ordered weeks ago and I’m confident I’m not the only one frantically clicking refresh on the order tracking hoping for an update. I’ve noticed many influencers already have holiday gift guides published and it feels like the holiday toy catalogs hit our mailbox earlier this year, too.

Every year we participate in holiday giving, but I felt we could be doing more while having better conversations with our kids about organizations in our community.

We always put the catalogs aside and after Halloween, we do a “catalog day” inspired by Kelle Hampton. It’s often on her holiday bucket list and it’s become a new tradition in our house. We play Christmas music and sip hot cocoa while we rotate the catalogs around and build our wish lists with red markers and stickers.

I was thinking earlier this week about how I want my kids to be more service-minded — although we help our community in many ways during the holiday season, it would be more fun if the kids had a more active role in choosing how and what to support. I decided to make another catalog - this time filled with charities. The idea was that alongside the local toy store, Target, and Amazon catalogs, there will be “The Compassion Catalog" that they can flip through and choose which organizations they want to support financially and with their time.

Thankfully I have thoughtful friends doing wonderful work with local organizations and they passed the names on to me. I was specifically looking to shine a light on the little guys. There are many larger organizations doing incredible work, but I really wanted to focus on places in our community and places that don’t get the same attention as other non-profits.

Every non-profit in The Compassion Catalog was recommended by someone I know personally. When I first started the project I intended to include scores from Charity Navigator or Charity Watch, but so many of these smaller organizations weren’t represented. I’ve included links to every nonprofit's website where most of them share their financial statements if that is an important part of your giving process.

Please know that any misrepresentation of an organization or their work is my own fault as I merged together information from their website or other media to build this catalog. It was important to me to share each charity’s mission as well as their story or impact, but I sometimes had to pull from several pages to obtain that information. If you see a mistake I made, please let me know so I can update it for future versions. I promise I had the best of intentions in my heart!

I hope that in future years I will continue to add to this catalog beyond the original 26 as we learn about new organizations. I’d also love to find a way to include more photos and use more appropriate language for young children —for this year, just pulling it together was the best I could do.

I’m so happy to share The Compassion Catalog with you all! I had to greatly reduce the file size to add it as a download here so if you need the full resolution copy, please just message me and I’ll be glad to email it over!

I’m excited for “catalog day” to be about giving as much as it is receiving. I hope others will use The Compassion Catalog or their own version of it to help teach their kids about the beautiful gift of service.