First of all, we hope everyone is keeping safe, warm, and healthy this holiday season.

As the US celebrates Thanksgiving this week, the mod team at r/Assistance wants to give a huge "thanks" of our own to our amazing community. This subreddit truly only exists because of all of you. "Assistance" can mean so many things -- $20, a warm meal, a delivery of ramen, a "happy birthday", or just a kind word when you're feeling low. What may seem like just a small amount of money or time for you may mean the world to someone else.

This year, and hopefully each year to come, we'd like to take this opportunity to look back on this year and all of the amazing things our community has done. The mod team has gone through a handful of the posts, stories, updates, and examples of that demonstrate how even though we're all just connected by Reddit, kindness can go so much deeper than that.

First of all, here are some AMAZING stats of how much our community has done this year, for those of you who love numbers.

To date, a staggering 2,288 requests have been fulfilled so far in 2023.

On top of that, another whopping 582 people have been helped by the huge variety of offers posted by those able to give.

On to the stories, selected by our moderator team.

Back in April, u/snafu168 shared the devastating news that their dad had suffered a stroke and was in critical condition. They reached out to our community for help getting to another state in order to be with their dad before he was taken off life support. We all rallied and were able to get them there for that last bit of precious time before their dad passed away.

A truly unique offer of some cash assistance by u/velocat challenged those interested to do some good in exchange, asking everyone to clean up their local park or street and provide a pic as proof! It was awesome to see everyone take that time to do something meaningful and help the earth in a small way.

u/legohandsforlife shared love for their late grandma, Shirley, for what would have been her 88th birthday this year. Redditors around the world joined in to help them celebrate what has always been a tough day.

We'd like to close off this post with another huge THANK YOU to everyone in our community. To those who provide assistance, for those who demonstrate the courage to ask for help. Those who give publicly, those who do so behind the scenes or anonymously. To everyone who has ever posted, commented, upvoted, awarded, or interacted with our community in a positive way, you are all amazing and this subreddit wouldn't be what it is without YOU!

Feel free to share your own stories of how you've received kindness, or paid kindness forward in the comments. If there are any posts that resonated with you personally, you can link those too!