Kindness-Focused Organizations
Organizations are working all over the U.S. to inspire and increase acts of kindness. Learn more about initiatives for finding and spreading kindness.
National Organizations
City of Kindness is a coalition of organizations working to inspire kindness in our world.
Their website provides resources for everyone wanting to spread kindness. Their goal is to effect meaningful change among schools, professionals, young people, elected officials, and companies. City of Kindness is a sponsored program of Social Impact Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Mayors across the country have come together to challenge the nation to adopt a culture of kindness in our cities, businesses and schools through acts of kindness. City of Kindness has committed to tracking these acts across the nation with their official “Kindness Counter.”
The Everyday Kindness program began as a partnership between the Association of California School Administrators and Keenan & Associates Insurance Company. Everyday Kindness is a turn-key, no-cost program that offers schools the tools needed to identify, record, and celebrate everyday acts of kindness. The program is meant to focus and target the kindness cultural movement for children, based on the belief that the proliferation of kindness will directly combat the root cause of bullying, violence, vandalism, and abuse within our schools.
The Feed Kindness, Starve Harm project focuses on why and how to fuse mindfulness, meditation and kindness into everyday living. It grew out of initial correspondence between Doug Carnine, a professor emeritus from the University of Oregon and Roy Tester, an inmate in a maximum-security prison. Dr. Carnine’s stated hope is that his two books and website “will communicate the value of mindful kindness and, on a very small scale, motivate and help people to be more kind (and less unkind).”
Random Acts of Kindness Foundation
The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation is working to make kindness effortless and have selfless acts be the norm. Their website includes kindness ideas, free posters and calendars, kindness quotations, videos and stories, and free lesson plans, training materials and other resources for educators. The foundation encourages individuals to become “RAKtivists” (Random Acts of Kindness Activists), kindness ambassadors who share knowledge and lead by example. Each month the organization sends out a special kindness challenge to their “RAKtivists” that benefits a worthy cause or individual.
Think Kindness inspires measurable acts of Kindness in schools and communities around the world. A team of speakers and leaders travel the country on a national “15 Days of Kindness” school tour, during which they challenge schools to change the world in just 15 days. Think Kindness has raised tens of thousands of dollars for charities around the country, collected more than 250,000 shoes for children around the world and carried out global acts of kindness through outreach trips to Kenya and Ghana.
SpreadKindness.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging and empowering people to practice kindness in their everyday lives. They provide individuals and groups with tools, ideas, projects and events that help make the world a kinder place. They hold events in the San Francisco Bay Area to perform random acts of kindness. Their Adopt-A-Soldier project collects donations and sends care packages, letters, and love to people deployed overseas.
Kind Campaign is an internationally recognized nonprofit organization that brings awareness and healing to the negative and lasting effects of girl-against-girl bullying through their global movement, documentary film, in-school assemblies and educational curricula. Their documentary, “Finding Kind,” was released in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, was accepted and awarded in over 20 film festivals and has screened in thousands of schools across the world. Kind Campaign Founders Assemblies have been held in hundreds of schools across North America, and 11 international anti-bullying school tours have been completed. Kind Campaign releases new initiatives each year; these have included their 19-week Kind Club Curriculum and Kind Camps.
“Kindness Is Contagious” is a documentary by David Gaz, narrated by Catherine Ryan Hyde, the best selling author of the novel (and film) “Pay It Forward.” It is a film about the benefits of being kind. “Kindness Is Contagious” profiles cutting-edge scientists and best-selling authors from Berkeley to Harvard and everywhere in between, as well as people from all walks of life whose lives illustrate how a little generosity can help us live a happier, healthier, wealthier, longer and more fulfilling life.
The Mission of KindnessEvolution is to incorporate the practice of intentional kindness into every aspect of society. In April, KindnessEvolution launched KindnessCollective 2018, gathering non-profit kindness leaders and exploring impactful collaboration. From that gathering, in solidarity with October National Bullying Prevention month, they launched their first unified initiative, “No Bullying, Period.” The Mission of “No Bullying, Period” is to bring greater awareness to the issue of bullying, provide free resources and help to facilitate involvement and action, in order to bring an end to bullying and ensure that all schools provide a safe and nurturing environment. Another major project of KindnessEvolution has been the development of CampKindness Day in collaboration with the American Camp Association. This unified day of theme based activities celebrates the value and impact of Intentional Kindness. On July 24th, 2018, over 350 Camps participated in CampKindness Day.
Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest
Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest is a community engagement experience that invites people around the world to inspire one another to reveal and promote acts of compassion that better our lives, our communities, and all life on Earth. Individual players and teams sign up to play in one or more Annual Compassion Games. Games can be played during other times of the year as well. Through the spirit of play, individual players and teams strive together to: 1) unify intentions within a global community, 2) amplify what is already working in local communities, 3) catalyze increased engagement around initiatives to address local and global challenges, 4) share reports that reflect on experiences and measure impact through an online “Compassion Report Map,” and 5) bring a growing movement of unprecedented, unified action to life. Over the past five years, the Compassion Games have been played in over 40 countries by more than 1,000,000 volunteer players who have served over 15 million people. Past teams have included community groups, faith congregations, schools, families, government agencies, businesses, and inmates in women’s prison.
Kindness is All Around Us includes several programs that help integrate more kindness into the world:
- Citizen Scientists help collect data on kindness.
- Kindlab is a research hub for examining and measuring how kindness appears in our everyday lives, and translating the data into programs and recommendations for meaningful change.
- Work Kind leverages the science of kindness to develop kinder workplaces. They bring their expertise to workplaces in all sectors with applied programs, workshops, and customized activations designed to positively affect: job satisfaction and engagement, physical and mental health, creativity and innovation, and connection and trust at all levels.
- Cyber-kindness involves creative content that motivates people to choose kindness, including: viral videos, collaborations, digital campaigns, and interactive art
Kindness is All Around Us has recorded over 95,000 kind acts and over 167,000,000 content views and has active community members in 193 nations.
KindSpring is a place to practice small acts of kindness. For over a decade the KindSpring user community has focused on inner transformation, while collectively changing the world with generosity, gratitude, and trust. The site is 100% volunteer-run and totally non-commercial. It is a shared labor of love.