Comfort as a Tool for Compassion

#NiceWork! Post 15 Tuft and Needle is a national mattress company on a mission to spread compassionate comfort. The company is an innovator in both premium mattress production and providing those in need with a great night’s sleep.  By donating mattresses and profits to local charities and causes, Tuft and Needle is strengthening communities and engaging customers at the same time.  

Valuing transparency and teamwork, Tuft and Needle founders, Daehee Park and JT Marino, have assembled a team of entrepreneurs dedicated to making a positive impact. Melanie LaDue, a member of the Tuft and Needle team, told Envision that Tuft and Needle, “has been intentional in making social mission and the community the heartbeat of our company.”  In order to engage customers and donate mattresses, Tuft and Needle has pioneered a unique return policy. If a customer chooses to return a mattress, the mattress isn’t returned to headquarters. Instead, the company works with individual customers in order to donate the mattress to local charities and nonprofit organizations such as St. Vincent de Paul Society in Phoenix, AZ. Of course, Tuft and Needle still redeems the customer for the cost of the mattress.

In addition to return donations, Tufts and Needle supports communities by partnering with a variety of nonprofits and charitable organizations such as, UMOM, Chrysalis, Ronald McDonald House Phoenix Charities, firehouses, and schools nationwide.  Through Tuft and Needle Gives Back program, partner schools are able to absorb 25% of profits from mattresses ordered by anyone affiliated with the school, from parents to teachers. Recently, Tuft and Needle even made a large-scale donation to help Hurricane Harvey relief efforts in Houston.

The social mission of Tuft and Needle is embedded within all of the staff acting from the belief that, “values aren’t what you want to be, it’s who you are…we’re going to take the spirit of [Tuft and Needle] and find more problems worth fixing…we’re just getting started,” founders Daehee Park and JT Marino say in their “Our Story” video on the Tuft and Needle’s website.

If you are in need of a better night’s sleep, check out Tuft and Needle’s mattresses: https://www.tuftandneedle.com/. Think of innovative ways to spread kindness and continue to positively impact your community!

When animals are loved, they love you back

Like humans, animals clearly can show empathy and caring for others, including humans.  These are images from Waterford Country School, a unique school in Connecticut that, as part its mission, takes in injured or disabled animals to give them shelter and rehabilitation.  Linda, one of the caretakers, clearly has an intimate relationship with the horse “Rusty Bucket” an abandoned horse taken in by WCS.  Not only does she actively love Rusty Bucket, but it is clear he loves her back.   As does Stormy the squirrel who Linda healed to get ready to go back into the wild.  Rick McPherson, the director of experiential education, came to Waterford Country School because “I was feeling a need to work with people instead of doing engineering work, I had no previous experience with animals, my love of animals developed here while working on the schools farm. ”

A cool aspect of WCS is that the rehabilitation of these animals is done by youngsters from the area who have significant social problems.  So while the animals get help, so do these kids.  For more info about WCS, please visit their site.