Why Was the Kindness Campaign Started?
Barry K. Weinhold, Ph.D.,
Founder & Director

In the summer of 1992, my wife and I reduced our belongings down to 17 boxes (12 of which were books) and left Colorado Springs to work for the United Nations on a project in Czechoslovakia. That fall the state of Colorado voted to amend its constitution to restrict the rights of gays and lesbians. Largely the result of a fear campaign spearheaded by a Colorado Springs group called Colorado for Family Values, news of this amendment reverberated around the world.

First, a little background about Colorado Springs. It is the home of over 71 fundamentalist Christian organizations, over 100 thousand military personnel and dependents, the Olympic Training Center and The Air Force Academy. Bill Moyers hosted a PBS documentary on Colorado Springs and after interviewing a number of its leaders, called it “Ground Zero of the next Holy War.”

After this amendment passed in the fall of 1992, we still proudly told people in Bratislava, Slovakia where we were living at the time that we were from Colorado. Their reply was “Oh, that’s the hate state. How could you live there?” Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this amendment before it ever took effect, the damage to the “common ground” in the community was extensive. When we returned to Colorado Springs in the spring of 1993, we found a community divided with two camps that fired insults at each other through the media.

I decided that since this was my community, I either was going to be part of the problem or part of the solution. I took some time to search for ways I come intervene and even offered to help mediate the conflict. When that failed, I sought a way to restore “common ground” that had been destroyed as the result of this amendment. Finally, I hit on the idea of using “kindness” as the tool to help restore the civility and mutual respect that seemed missing. My idea was that thousands of acts of kindness go unnoticed each day because the media focuses on the violence and other bad news.

I decided to test my idea in one of my graduate classes at the university where I was teaching. I asked my students to keep track of the number of acts of kindness that they do in the next week and I supplied them with log sheets to record the acts. The 20 students came back with over 250 acts of kindness logged in for the week. I asked them to keep logging, and after three weeks, I knew I was right as their totals continued to climb.

I hypothesized that if I could get about 20% of the population of Colorado Springs focusing kindness and mutual respect, it would shift the consciousness of the city. In order to do that I knew I needed help from the media and I needed to know if the conservative Christian majority of the community would support this idea. I talked privately to a fundamentalist Christian minister that I knew about the idea and asked him if he that his colleagues would see this as some kind of “new age” program. He thought for a minute and then quoted several Bible verses and then said, “No, kindness is theologically sound.”

With that concern settled, I went to talk to the News Director at the local CBS affiliate, someone I knew through a video project he had helped us produce. I told him I was interested in the station become the media sponsor of the kindness campaign I was starting. I explained how the news shows on his station could feature positive news stories and could help promote acts of kindness in the community. He was mildly interested, but I could see that my request was a stretch for a traditional network affiliate. He told me he would think about it, discuss my idea with others at the station and get back to me. I assumed from the tone of the meeting, that I might not even hear from him again.

However, I got very lucky. That afternoon on his station, Oprah Winfrey did her whole show on the effects of random acts of kindness on people. To make a long story short, the station agreed to be the media sponsor and remained in that capacity for over five years. They set up a “kindness line” where people could call in and report acts of kindness that they witnessed. Then they ended their evening news shows by playing one of these recorded messages. They also followed up on some of the more interesting ones and turned them into news features. The kindness line caught on immediately and the station had hundreds of call each week. After six months, they conducted a viewer survey and found to their amazement that over 70% of their viewers knew about the Kindness Campaign and 75% of those said they thought the Campaign was “…having a significant effect on reducing violence in the community.”

Another stroke of luck helped heal the rift between the two polarized groups in the community. The station agreed to tape and play Public Service Announcements during their broadcast day about the Kindness Campaign. They asked me to submit a list of names of key people to tape these announcements. Among a group of community leaders, I selected were the leader of the Colorado for Family Values group and the leader for the Citizen’s Project, the group that opposed the amendment to limit gay rights.

The station’s Community Relations Coordinator invited both of these men to the studio at the same time to tape the PSA and when they saw each other, they turned to leave. The station manager, who knew both of them, persuaded them to stay and do the 30 second PSA. They stood side by side and talked about the importance of kindness in the community. This PSA played repeatedly in prime time and throughout the broadcast day. Buoyed by the success of this ice-breaking meeting, these two men decided to continue meeting for lunch on a regular basis. This led to the formation of a project called “dialogue dinners” where a group, chosen because of their diversity, agreed to meet for three dinners together to discuss common areas of agreement and disagreement. The idea caught on and they organized over 400 of these dinners in the next several years.

The currency of the Campaign a “Kindness Button” that people get for signing a pledge card to do an act of kindness for themselves or someone else. The instructions are to wear the button and to look for an opportunity to pass it on by catching someone else doing a kind act.

We then began to make presentation in the community and in schools. We made over 400 of these during the first five years of the Campaign and we started programs in over 125 local schools. We created a whole set of program guides—for schools, pre-schools, families and for other communities that wanted to organize similar programs.

Shortly after the program began, I had an opportunity to speak before the city council. I told them that my vision was that someday Colorado Springs would be know as a “Community of Kindness.” I said I hoped to see signs at the airport and along the major highways leading into the city that would say, “Welcome to Colorado Springs, a community of kindness. The home of over 250,000 kind people and a few sore heads.” The council members seemed uncomfortable with my vision, except for one Councilwoman who smiled at me and winked. Little did I know that two years later that council woman would be the mayor and her first act as mayor was to declare her intention to restore kindness and civility to city government. A year later, Colorado Springs became one of three U. S. cities to named a “Community of Kindness.” The others selected were Dallas, Texas and Angel’s Camp California.

The main impact of the Kindness Campaign came in the schools where bullying, put-downs and other forms of unkindness were affecting the learning climate. Some kids were actually afraid to go to school and about 10% dropped out before graduating because of the bullying and harassment they received at school. Again, my hypothesis was that if you could focus everybody’s attention on the positive things that were happening much of the unkind behavior would go away. The results of research we conducted showed that there was an immediate drop of over 30% in referrals to the office in the three weeks following the introduction of the Kindness Campaign in a school. The long-term results showed a yearlong drop of 26% from the previous year. Area businesses also “adopted” schools and paid for the time and materials needed to bring the Kindness Campaign to that school. Some companies actually paid their employees for the time they spent volunteering in their “adopted” school.

The other areas of the community that responded to the Campaign were the neighborhood associations and the churches. Several key neighborhood associations conducted an annual nomination and awards process to identify the kindest people in the neighborhood in various categories, like Kindest Senior Citizen. The area churches took part in an annual Interfaith Celebration of Kindness where each faith group presented the ways kindness is part of their faith community. After the service, we held a potluck dinner with each faith tradition bringing some food to share that was special to their tradition.

We ended each year with the Community of Kindness Awards Ceremony where children nominated the kindest adults, adults nominated the kindest children and youth, people nominated large and small businesses and non-profits for their contributions to the creation of a “Community of Kindness.” Finally, high and low profile individuals received Humanitarian Awards for their contributions to the community.

All of these things contributed to a major shift in consciousness in this community. Over about a six-year period, the Campaign spread to 11 other cities and eventually to over 600 schools in the U. S. and Canada. I had a great deal of fun and a good feeling, seeing that one person with an idea can still make a difference. One of my greatest compliments came from two eighth grade boys who were sitting outside their middle school when I arrived to give them more kindness buttons. I over heard one boy say to the other, “Hey. There goes the “kindness dude.”

You can find out how to start a Kindness Campaign in your community by emailing me at barryk@weinholds.org or calling me at (828) 681-1820.