Photo: Courtesy of LifeSoap

Buy soap, bring clean water to a community thousands of miles away. That's the premise behind LifeSoap, a new company that sells trios of organic bar soap—which it calls Boxes of Joy—and pledges 90 percent of the after-tax profits to fund clean water and sanitation projects in developing countries.
For $20 a month, LifeSoap delivers a fresh Box of Joy to your door every four weeks, along with an update on their humanitarian projects. The company's 25-year-old founders, Juwon Melvin and Aaron Madonna, are passionate about solving the clean water crisis—and making great soap. Their bars combine organic oils with soothing ingredients like oatmeal and shea butter (and skip synthetic fragrances, colors, and preservatives). LifeSoap's first project, rehabilitating wells and building latrines at a school in Nicaragua, is already under way.

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Photo: Thinkstock

Social networks. We love them for the ways they bring people together, introduce us to new things, and provide convenient ways to force cute baby anecdotes onto the world. We don't love them for the ways they can suck us away from the real world and into the virtual one, and for that glazed, slightly queasy feeling we get when we've spaced out in front of the screen for too long. Enter: Kindify, a new social network that focuses not on posting ill-advised party pics, but instead, on doing good.

The idea is to set into motion chains of kindness: you do a good deed, you post it on the site, and you ask a friend to do a good deed in return. I admit I found this a little intimidating (my "good deeds tree" would look so...wintry!), but the site assures me that something as small as buying someone a coffee can count. I love the idea of being part of a community of kindness, of making an effort to do good every day, and I have the feeling that time spent on Kindify would leave me feeling uplifted and positive, without that peedy "OMG Everyone's having such amazing vacations but me" kind of social network hangover other sites can sometimes cause. Every little old ladies waiting to cross a street better look out, because I'm coming to help...whether they like it or not!

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