Surprise! It’s Random Acts of Kindness Week

A week for kindness is fun and inspiring, but you'll never guess how it started — and who's working to keep it going.

Remember when everybody had bumper stickers that said “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty?" Whether you found the sentiment inspiring or passive-aggressive, there was no avoiding it — for a while in the 90s, it was everywhere.

While the phrase seems to have faded from public imagination, it turns out that the notion is alive and well. So alive in fact that this week, February 15 to 21, is Random Acts of Kindness Week.

“The goal is that people find ways to celebrate by engaging in kind acts,” said Marilyn Decalo, manager of the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, which serves as a facilitator for the week’s activities, providing materials, ideas, curricula and publicity for the quest to be kind. “People really have a desire to perform good deeds.”

Kindness in Every Corner

Individuals and institutions around the country are designing their own ways of celebrating. The mayor of Nutley, N.J., for example, has declared the town’s participation in the Week, asking residents to log their kind acts on the Township’s website in a quest to outdo last year’s total of 10,000 acts.

Schools are taking the opportunity to promote kindness as well, with some elementary schools teaching special kindness-oriented lesson plans and universities getting students involved in charitable activities on campus.

“It makes them feel good and it allows them to make a difference in other people’s lives,” said Decalo. “That’s who we are as human beings.”

Naturally Kind?

But if that’s who we are, why do we need a week of structured activities to help us get going?

“The key is not whether we’re born one way or the other but realizing that we are born with the potential to go either way,” said Jason Marsh, Editor-in-Chief of Greater Good Magazine, published by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and co-editor of the book The Compassionate Instinct.

“We’re only really as good as our expectations for ourselves and for others. When we’re given some broad social reminders to be kind it presents a potential to awake and elicit our natural propensities for kindness.”

Okay, fair enough, but why does it have to be random? What ever happened to the good, old-fashioned tradition of being kind to everyone all the time?

Decalo and Marsh both believe that the randomness makes the kindness all the more powerful. “Being totally kind to strangers randomly, it would be hard to determine any selfish motives,” said Marsh. “It’s really just about spreading kindness with no expectation of any return.”

Even if random acts of kindness can’t be called selfish, research does bear out that giving to other people rather than to ourselves does indeed benefit us. A 2008 study published in Science found that “spending more of one's income on others predicted greater happiness.”

In that case, where do I sign up? Decalo suggested searching the Internet for related events going on in your area this week. Or create your own momentum by making some plans of your own.

Never Heard of It!

Didn’t even know Random Acts of Kindness Week existed? You’re not the only one, though you might be surprised to hear that this particular event had a rather high-profile beginning. In 1994, the 103rd Congress passed H.J.RES.357 (PDF) a resolution declaring the week starting February 12, 1995 to be “National Random Acts of Kindness Week.”

Marsh pointed out the irony of officially sanctioning something that’s supposed to be random (as seen in this series of photos of an elderly man who fell on the sidewalk, and the strangers who picked him up), but acknowledged that every little bit of encouragement helps. “Things that seem random often don’t happen without some type of broad sense of approval or encouragement,” he noted.

Congress acted after the phrase “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” had grown steadily in popularity since being coined by California writer Anne Herbert in 1982. After various other publications picked up on it in the early 1990s, it started showing up in West Coast graffiti and, of course, on bumper stickers everywhere. In 1993, Bakersfield College professor Chuck Wall started a “random acts of kindness” movement (taking credit for the slogan himself, hardly in keeping with his mission), and Herbert published a book taking its title from the phrase.

All that remained was for Congress to jump on the bandwagon in 1994. While the official designation was only for the second week in February of 1995, nonprofit organizations have kept the tradition alive ever since.

Who’s Behind All This Kindness?

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, which bills itself as the US delegate to the World Kindness Movement and facilitates the Random Acts of Kindness Week, is funded by billionaire business mogul Philip Anschutz and his wife Nancy, who prefer to remain largely anonymous in their kindness-related philanthropic efforts.

Those efforts also include the Foundation’s sister organization, Foundation for a Better Life, which exists solely “to encourage others to do good” and creates and disseminates various inspirational materials such as billboards, posters, TV spots and audio clips. The Anschutzes have spent more than $23 million over the last decade and a half establishing and running these two organizations.

Anschutz is co-founder of Qwest Communications, owns major tracts of land in Colorado and is a force to be reckoned with in oil, railroad, media and sports (he has large investments in several soccer teams, the LA Lakers and the LA Kings). He is an active Republican donor and a Christian fundamentalist known for funding conservative causes, such as a campaign to support a 2006 ballot initiative in Colorado, Amendment 2, that barred government from prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Whether that seems to you just as it should be or outrageously contradictory given Anschutz’s fixation on kindness, you can’t deny that he is indeed to thank for spreading inspiring thoughts through our cities on giant billboards and encouraging us all to be kind to each other this week.

"I believe he's a man of faith, probably someone who's had some realizations in his life and is trying to carry them out," said Douglas Gresham, a co-producer of the film The Chronicles of Narnia, along with Anschutz’s company Walden Media, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Did he have a hand in convincing Congress to pass H.J.RES.357 in 1994 to get Random Acts of Kindness Week elevated to official status? That answer is lost to history, alas, but a decade and a half later, the Week and all the goodness it inspires continues on.

Kindness (window) by jek in the box via Flickr

Photo 2 by Zorislav Stojanović via Flickr

"An elderly man fell down on the curb. Three strangers helped him up." Photo series by HarlanH via Flickr

"Random Acts of Kindness" bumper sticker photo by Shira Golding via Flickr

Children holding hands courtesy of stock.xchng