Cards of Kindness

The lesson that I learned during Covid, one that is reinforced nearly daily in my life since the pandemic began, is the importance of COMMUNITY.

Community comes in all shapes and forms.  Our immediate (blood or adopted) families.  Our friends.  Our chosen families.  The members of a place of worship.  Co-workers.  Neighbors.  An educational cohort.

Community.

Pre-Covid, I will confess, my community was quite small.  But as our worlds began to narrow – as we stayed home, afraid to interact with others outside our “bubble” – a strange thing happened.

Unbeknownst to me, the significance of community was percolating in my brain.

And slowly, unintentionally, I began to build community for myself.  I put out a poll on our corner every morning – totally insignificant questions posed to passersby, the results not even tabulated.  I began to not only give away and receive things in a local online exchange group, I started to also post thank you photos and blurbs about how the items I received were now being given new life.  I wrote more frequent stories of kindness and shared them.  I asked neighbors to join in and beat pots and pans in the evenings to thank the health care professionals….

Each of these acts (and the many others somehow dreamed up while on lock-down) had a compounding effect:  They.  Built.  Community. 

And now I have been reminded that communities are not only there to celebrate in the joyous times, but they are also there to rally and support in times of stress, unhappiness, uncertainty, and grief. 

Arlington, Virginia, the physical community where we live, suffered a great sadness recently.  Five students at Wakefield, a local high school, overdosed on the same day.  One, Sergio Flores (age 14), died.  And just two days later, the facility was on lockdown for three hours as police searched the premises to find who had brought a loaded gun to school.

These instances shook the community.  The school was in shock.  I can’t imagine how the teachers, counselors, bus drivers, and other staff members felt in the wake of both the tragedy and the scare. 

In troubled times like this, most humans respond with a sense of caring.  We want to be helpful somehow, but how??  There are no actions that can make things “better” in times like that, but we search for something, anything, that can perhaps somehow contribute to the greater good.

So, I put out a call for cards.

I asked in a couple of community groups:  can you please handwrite a card for a Wakefield staff member and drop it off on my porch?  I explained that we needed 260 (the number we originally thought would equal a card for each teacher and assistant).  Many, many people responded.  Some offered to write cards.  Some offered blank cards for others to use.  Some made hand crafted cards.  One even offered to furnish supplies and teach others how to make cards.

And so, like many of the ideas in my head, this one grew and grew.  Our ask of 260 cards grew to a bigger ask – wanting to include ALL staff (janitorial staff, security, bus drivers, food staff, counselors…).  And the cards kept coming!  A neighbor offered her porch for a secondary drop-off location for cards. 

Cards - handwritten by loving and supportive members of the COMMUNITY. 
Gifts - small tokens to show that the staff of Wakefield High School is not alone.

In just a few days, 481 cards were written.  This is many more than were needed to give one to each staff member.  I used Kindness Activist funds to order 352 gifts from a lovely Etsy shop – lip balms, bath bombs, and a few headache relief rollers (Maggie's Farm Aromatics Etsy Shop ).  When I explained Kindness Activist and the situation at the high school to the shop owner, she gladly gave me a discount.

Handcrafted lip balms, headache relief rollers, and bath bombs - 
a gift for each and every staff member.

Then my sister and I headed out to find the perfect way to display, transport, and give the cards and gifts.  We thought a basket would be good – but where does one find a basket big enough for everything we had to fit inside it??  I will tell you where – GOODWILL… Call it a miracle, call it kismet, call it luck, call it proof of a Higher Power – whatever you choose to label it, our local Goodwill had the prettiest, BIGGEST basket ever.  And of course, since it was Goodwill, it was one of a kind.  What are the chances???

The biggest basked we have ever seen.  It was far too heavy for one person to carry.

On a sunny Monday, we carried the heavy basket into the school office.  The bath bombs made such a lovely scent, and the basket filled with cards and gifts was a sight to behold.  We left it there for office staff to distribute cards and gifts as they saw fit.

Wakefield teachers and staff - THE COMMUNITY IS BEHIND YOU.

This is community.

This is many hands and hearts pitching in – each one showing support.  This is caring.  This.  Is.  Love.

Kindness Activist funds spent:  $1028.01

Support shared:  immeasurable

Cards of Kindness

Look, I am not naïve enough to think that a little kindness can put a dent in solving what is happening in our country right now.  It feels as if the world is on fire and no amount of kindness can put it out at this point.  Only equality and justice can begin to right these wrongs. 

But today is the first time in over a week that I have been able to focus.  It is the first time I have been able to think of action instead of anger.  Of fighting instead of crying.  So, I thought maybe a tiny dose of kindness was in order and that it might shine a little candlelight in this dark world.

This is a kind act done by a Facebook friend of mine, Katie.  I have met her a couple of times in person, she and I are both interpreters (American Sign Language/English), but mostly we know each other from social media.  A while back she messaged me and ask for my mailing address.  She said she wanted to send me a “Covid Card”.  Curious (and a lover of mail), I replied with my address.

Katie and her dog Collins ("Rent" fans will recognize that name!)

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I found THIS in my mail!!!!

Isn’t it fabulous????  It brightened my day so much!  I asked Katie if I could write about her project here, in the hopes that it might inspire someone else to do something as cool as she did.  Here’s what she told me.

“I love mailing and receiving cards and letters. It can connect you with people you’d never imagine connecting with. I have been struggling with my anxiety and mental illness since the stay at home orders began a couple months ago. I thought it would be helpful for me, and hopefully others, if I were to reach out on an individual level to the people in my life.”

Ok, yeah Katie.  I adore mail.  Like, I literally used to walk down 3 or 4 flights of stairs twice a day just to check and see if I had any mail (and I rarely did).  But that doesn’t mean I thought, “Hey, Susan, why don’t you mail out over 500 Covid cards to people….”.  Yes – you read that right.  She sent out over 500 cards!!  She said she sent 503, but with the stragglers the total will be closer to 505 or 510.  She sent them all over America (Alaska, New York, California, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and all around the east coast). A few lucky people in in England, Ireland, and Australia got them, too!

A playful side of Katie at Niagara Falls

Katie likes to send cards to her friends and family for their birthdays, so this project sort of grew out of that.  She was writing out the birthday cards for March and April, then, “…I remembered how fun it is (to send cards) and how much I enjoy it. I also happened to find a BUNCH of stamps and friendship cards just that month, so I had a lot to get started on without much investment up front. It began as mainly the people I write to on their birthdays. I enjoyed it so much and people were responding SO kindly to the idea, I reached out to as many people as I could on Facebook. I’ve reconnected with a ton of people from my high school!”.

Of course I asked Katie the obvious question, WHY DID SHE DO THIS GRAND GESTURE??  “Partially for my own mental health, but more so for those around me. I thought about doing it for strangers, but the closest I got to that was making one for each person in my apartment building; I don’t know all of those people very well. But I’ve realized what I was really looking for was connections through kindness.”  That’s profound…  And, in the end, I think it is what all of us are looking for – connections through kindness. 

One thing I so admire about Katie is her honesty about mental health.  She doesn’t cloak her mental illness, she talks about it.  Her diagnoses are Bipolar 2 and ADHD.  I think openness like hers is so needed.  If more people were willing to be frank, there would be no stigma attached to mental illness.  When I asked her how she has been doing during Covid 19 she said, “To be honest, not that great. I’ve had a number of mental and physical side effects due to the increased anxiety and stress from being quarantined. My psychiatrist has had to change my meds, which did help, but I’m extremely extroverted, so I need those connections to be more present in my life.”  Isn’t it great that she found a way to make those connections without endangering her health??  US Postal Service to the rescue!!!

The newest Kindness Activist - Katie

But gestures this grand don’t come free….  So, how much DID she spend??  “Oh gosh, I’ve honestly been trying NOT to calculate it, because I’m afraid it’s a good bit, and I haven’t been able to work (the unemployment office thinks it’s paying me, but they haven’t started my payments from when I set it up in April!). But it’s $0.59 per stamp, and in averaging out the MANY sets of greeting cards I had, I maybe spent $1-$2 on each card for each person. So, that’s like almost $800. But as I mentioned, I found a bunch of cards and stamps for probably close to 100 people, so I (hopefully) spent less than that.”

“For my next project,” Katie told me, “I’m going to frame all the cards I’ve received in return and put them on my bedroom wall to remember that there are lots of people out there that I’ve had an impact on.”  Well Katie, my return card (which will include your official Kindness Activist pin and a donation for stamps) will be mailed soon!!!  Thank you for being a source of KINDNESS in the world.

And to everyone else reading, let’s take a tip from Katie.  Maybe we won’t mail 500 cards, but even 3 or 4 would brighten people’s days.  And we all need a bit of kindness these days.