YORK COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM)– This is one of those stories that’s hard to say exactly where and when it starts but for now, let’s start, bright and early Tuesday morning at York Central Market for Kindness Week.
I asked Brandon, a York Academy first-grader, what he was doing there.
“Giving out flowers,” Brandon said. And when I asked him why, he said it was “to show kindness.”
Brandon was handing out flowers and kind notes at the market. His friend Laylah too. The kindness that they are giving out is being given right back.
“They said ‘thank you,’ and I said ‘you’re welcome,'” Laylah said.
And when Amelia, another first-grader from York Academy, was asked how that made her feel…
“Happy,” Amelia said, already finding out at a young age that when you’re nice to someone, they will be nice right back.
“Because it’s nice, and sometimes they be nice to you,” Amelia said. “They’d be nice to you, and I got the candy snacks.”
All this really started with Kevin Smith.
“So what are you going to do to celebrate Kindness Week,” Smith asked Amelia.
It all started seven months ago.
“Well, one act of kindness on Good Friday morning changed my life,” Smith said.
After a bad start to the day. He lost his wallet at the store.
“A good samaritan woman was at my front door with wallet in hand,” Smith said. “And it just led to the next steps and turned into an adventure of a lifetime. I founded a nonprofit called Kindness Worldwide.”
Systemizing kindness.
Smith still even had the same wallet with him, but this time he wasn’t going to lose it.
“It’s a little beaten up,” Smith said. “I’m not going to lose it today, though.”
“And the lord says it’s better to give than receive,” Cakes By Lee worker Bill Johnson said.
A lesson that starts – for these kids – with giving and receiving flowers, cake pops and rings.
“They’re very polite,” Johnson said. “A lot of people think the kids today are very impolite and rude, and I don’t believe that’s the case.”
“This is a time when we recognize our world’s got a lot of troubles at the moment and a lot of challenges, but the solutions are simple”.” Smith said. “We just need more kindness.”
There’s a lot of other goodness to this story that even involves the York SPCA, the animal shelter, that we will get to at another time.
