GDS Magazine | 37 Kindness Grows at Greensboro Day School By Tilly Hamer ’27 and Mrs. Gwen Lowe W hat would the world be like if we all made a point to do something kind every day? Mrs. Lowe’s third grade class decided to try and make this happen! On November 13, 2017, International Kindness Day, Mrs. Lowe asked her students to write “Do Something Kind Today” on a Post-It note. Instead of writing the whole phrase, I wrote D.S.K.T for short. We placed this Post-It note on our desks to remind us to do something kind at some point throughout this day. For the remainder of the day I became very distracted with this acronym. It was a catchy acronym that stood for something awesome! I started to draw designs around it to make it look like a logo. My classmates began to help me with these designs and before we knew it, we had come up with what we felt like was something memorable and powerful. This was the beginning of our third grade project about kindness. Our next decision was how would we let everyone know about this? After many discussions as an entire class, we decided we would have t-shirts made to help this idea come to life. Along with our kind deeds, we would donate all of the money we profit from the t-shirt sale to help with the Heifer International Gift Ark fundraiser in the Lower School. This Gift Ark project was started by the class of 2025 last school year and is being continued by the class of 2026. The hopes are to raise $5000 to buy a variety of farm animals to help provide for villages around the world. With our t-shirt idea in place, some of my classmates and I went to Pam Hemphill, the Chief Financial Officer of the school to discuss all of the logistics. We discussed how much it would be to print the shirts, the cost of buying the shirts, the demand, the quality of the shirts and of course, our profit. We also had to figure out how to advertise. We decided to make announcements at every division’s assembly and make posters to hang around the school. Third graders volunteered to present this idea at the middle school assemblies, the lower school assemblies and finally at the upper school assembly. The t-shirt sale was a huge success! We sold 100 t-shirts and profited $667 dollars for Heifer International. To continue spreading the word of kindness, we decided to have business cards made. These business cards are handed out to remind people to be kind each day. Our hopes is people will take the card as a reminder to do an act of kindness and then put the card somewhere else to encourage other people to do the same. We have set up an email address so people can share their acts of kindness with us (DoSomethingKindToday2018@gmail.com). Through this process we also discovered that we need to be recognizing the kind deeds we do throughout our days. Each week we are asked to document the acts of kindness we do and share them with our class. It is important to us to not only try and spread the kindness through our t-shirts and business cards but also by being role models of kindness. We hope this article finds a place in your heart and you can help our third grade class spread kindness through D.S.K.T (Do Something Kind Today). Send your kind deeds to DoSomethingKindToday2018@gmail.com