Before Lindsey Barr had kids, she was connecting with people in her community. When she had her children, the connecting extended to fellow parents and the village around her. She would organize special events for families to meet and for the kids to play, and she would help find ways to bring her community together.
Eventually, she was inspired to create an organization called World Changing Kids where she offers school and community-based kindness initiatives for children, families, and educators. World Changing Kids helps empower kids to be kindness leaders in our world. And we love this!
It feels like there’s no better time than now for this movement, and a kindness initiative is a wonderful way for families to participate together. There are multiple ways your children can get involved. Here are just a few:
The Book: Plant a Garden of Kindness
In this book, there are 75 acts of kindness children and their families can do. The hope is that 52 activities are picked, and one is done per week for an entire year. What kind of change and impact do you think that would have on your own family? This book and the acts within will help kids learn about empathy, community and developing connections with others in their own neighbourhood and city. The book is available for purchase online for $20.
Activity #24 in the book: Share bubbles!
The Learn More, Do Better Program
This program will help empower kids to be leaders and to become more engaged in the world around them. The program includes 52 conversation starters to be sent via email for families to have important discussions related to specific holidays, environmental dates and other upcoming calendar events. Included in the program is also a calendar with artwork created by children at a local school (and a donation from each subscription is made to that school as well!) This calendar and the conversation starters cost less than $4 per month for your family.
Custom Workshops
In addition, World Changing Kids creates custom kindness packages and workshops for recreational facilities, local groups, churches, and sports programs. These kindness packages might mean the creation of a customized workbook for the group, or it could be a workshop where families can learn more about kindness initiatives and making a change in their community.
The World Changing Kids Thanks & Giving Workshop: Making Kindness Bags out of old t-shirts
Kindness Programs in Schools
There’s also the school-specific “Year of Kindness” program being offered where students, teachers, and parents can all get involved. These packages are available as a self-guided program requiring school volunteers and administrative support or as a guided program. In the guided school Year of Kindness program, a World-Changing Kids staff member will help facilitate three school assemblies and provide additional support. Not only will there be assemblies for the kids to really get involved, but also support material, 100 daily acts of kindness to share with students, 25 weekly acts to be shared with families and more interactive ways for kids to really connect to the program.
The World Changing Kids website and blog is full of great information about the organization, relevant conversations that are timely with both world and national news, and details about their special events that are promoting kindness and community building. Their Facebook page is also a wonderful resource for positive, interesting messaging, book recommendations for kids, and local happenings.
We love the thought of a kindness movement taking place in our schools and in our homes and World Changing Kids is working hard to help empower our kids to be the positive change agents for kindness.
If you want more information about how you can introduce your child to these acts of kindness, or how you can potentially bring World Changing Kids programming into your school or community organization, visit their website. We look forward to hearing more about what World Changing Kids has planned and how so many of our children can make a difference in our community.
Tagged under: kindness,world changing kids
Category: classes
