In 2006, donor support enabled us to:

• Give people the opportunity to create candle groups around shared themes like a birthday, prayers for an ailing loved one, or world peace.  At the moment of this writing, 600 groups are active.  
• Add new threaded-discussion software as the centerpiece of our community-building efforts.  As we hoped, people are striking up conversations and supporting each other in our pilot forum,
  “Light a Candle,” leaving twice the number of messages each week that visitors used to leave in all our 18 message boards combined.
• Provide Polish and Slovene translations of our candle feature, bringing more than 1,000 new Eastern European visitors to our site.
• Design an engaging mini-course, “What Can Gratefulness Accomplish?” The course weaves together our ten topics with their abundance of resources that people can use to bring themselves continually back into a grateful alignment.
• Inspire people with good news, like animal-care training in Pakistan that reverses earthquake devastation and the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh for his innovative approach to helping the poor launch businesses.
• Compile a sequence of articles – for personal reflection or group discussion – to help people understand gratefulness step-by-step and apply it to their personal lives, relationships, and our global family.
• Allow webmasters to custom-design entrance pages from their sites to our Light-a-Candle feature in any of fourteen languages.
• Switch to a new web-server that accommodates our increasing visitor traffic, which has reached as high as 28,000 hits in a single day.
• Increase our newsletter base from 12,000 to 16,000 subscribers, receiving feedback like “Thank you for the BEAUTIFUL September newsletter and all its contents!  What a treasure trove of healing and inspiration. You do enrich lives.”
• Feature pieces by special guests, such as “Healing through Gratefulness: A film-viewing adventure,” by Dr. Francis Lu, who co-teaches Esalen film seminars with Brother David; and “Those Last Precious Words,” Joan Halifax Roshi’s reflections on the Sago Mine accident and of the sacredness of life.
• Post a convenient Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for people who wonder, for instance, how to get a printer-friendly version of one of our articles or whether they can edit a message they left with a candle they lit.
• Carry out a successful fundraising campaign, with gifts surpassing by $200 our goal.  This support allows us to provide, in the words of a poetic friend, "a place for reflection where no gust, no storm can extinguish the flame."
• Create an ANG*L brochure that is easy to print and share with anyone interested in how gratefulness gives meaning to life.
  
• Offer a continual stream of poetry, Gratefulnews updates, Gift-People essays, Question-and-Answer Box answers, and new and seasonal ecard selections. Even when there’s no holiday to celebrate, visitors send an average of 850 ecards each week.

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  Thanks to your support, we have been able to keep Gratefulness.org thriving since Thanksgiving 2000.
  We welcome contributions
  of any size.
  
  

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  Questions?  Please contact us.
  2005 Report: What your support enabled us to accomplish.