It used to be the norm to care for our neighbours. These days, though, our society is becoming more and more individualistic.
Figuring out how to bring community back into our lives and towns is a puzzle that Lacombe’s Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) hopes to solve. One way is through their Kindness Campaign, which launches February 1st.
For the whole month of February, they’re inviting local businesses to decorate their stores using the kindness kits they give out. The kits are packed with sticky notes, buttons, and ribbons. They’re meant to inspire goodwill in the community.
This is the third year that the Lacombe FCSS is running the campaign. Last year, close to 80 businesses participated.
Still, several business owners that participated in last year’s campaign reported that they didn’t see much difference in how people acted and talked.
One business owner said that the decorations “blinged up the place,” but that “nobody commented, nobody said anything. There wasn’t a boo about it.”
By themselves, decorations aren’t enough to create kindness and community.
Random Acts of Kindness
Kim, owner of Hometown Market in Lacombe, has a different story to tell about the Kindness Campaign, though.
For her, the campaign got her and her staff thinking about how they could spread kindness in the community.
One year, the team brainstormed uplifting messages and wrote them on the sticky notes. They created a wall of positive thoughts with the notes.
“We encouraged people that were coming in that if there was a note that resonated with them, to take it with them,” she says.
She and her staff took extra time out of their days to think about how they could show kindness to people.
The team took their kindness beyond the walls of their workplace, too. They went to a couple of places in the community where people gather, including the Lacombe Memorial Center, the library, and the arena. They put sticky notes with encouraging messages on the walls of these places. That way, anyone who ran into them would get a little extra dose of kindness.
“We also did a Random Acts of Kindness day where we bought some chocolate bars, some flowers, and a few different things. We went to the drive through and surprised someone there with a treat, we found a gas attendant at the Coop and gave them a gift,” she says.
But her favourite interaction was with a snow grader. It had just snowed the day that they did their Random Acts of Kindness. Kim flagged down one of the city employees driving a grader, and hopped up on the machine. She thanked him for all the hard work he did to serve the community.
“He actually teared up a little,” she recalls.
A Roadmap for Community
Saying that small towns are friendlier is almost a cliché. In small towns, people know each other. We run into the same people at the gas station and at the grocery store all the time. Having community in our small towns is something we can easily take for granted.
But as Lacombe’s Kindness Campaign shows us, kindness and community aren’t a given. They’re things that we have to keep building if we want to keep them around in our towns.
Still, getting out of our individualistic lives and back into communities isn’t a mystery. It takes individual leaders reaching out to people.
It’s not always easy to do. Kim agrees with that. She’s a community leader, but she knows how easy it can be to put community building to the side.
“I’m guilty of getting so bogged down with the to dos,” she says. “I have kids, I run a business. It can be easy to get sucked into the trap of being in your own bubble.”
But, as anyone who’s done something unexpected for someone else knows, being kind is fun. It’s fun to surprise people with our thanks and our words of encouragement.
Being a leader in our communities can sound intimidating. We don’t know where to start, and we don’t know how people will react. But as Kim’s stories of kindness will tell us, they pay off big, both for others and for ourselves.
