Pass it on -- kindness is about to go global. It's been 14 years since Chuck Wall ignited a grass-roots movement in his Bakersfield College classroom and "random acts of kindness" became a national catchphrase.

 

Photo by John Harte

Chuck Wall has retired as a BC professor, but is still a very busy man as the founder of Kindness Inc.

Teresa Leach, Chuck Wall's assistant will be traveling to Germany to hand out kindness grams and coins to wounded American soldiers.

Now, he's sending a little kindness to where it matters most -- all the way to Germany.

Men and women of America's armed forces recuperating from battle wounds at the Ramstein Air Base and nearby Landstuhl Regional Medical Center can expect a heart-healing dose of caring in May when Teresa Leach, Wall's chief "kindness ambassador," arrives bearing kindness grams and coins.

Leach, whose own son started his Iraq tour in Ramadi a month ago, says she'll "go room-to-room" at the hospital, delivering kid-authored kindness grams until each of the wounded gets one.

"They're exhausted, they've been through hell and they're on their last leg home," says Leach of the men and women she'll visit. "The grams and coins remind them that they're remembered back home. That's what they want most, to be remembered."

Leach captured the kindness vision years ago as Wall's teaching assistant at Bakersfield College. In the year since his retirement, the two have taken the movement's core question -- "Today I will commit one random act of senseless kindness ... Will you?" -- to Kern County classrooms.

The message is getting out. Kindness clubs are popping up on junior high and high school campuses and volunteer kindness ambassadors like Leach are regularly invited to elementary schools to teach a 30-minute manners-and-kindness lesson.

"It's not the schools' job to teach values, but so many parents aren't doing it," says Wall. "The result is that the teacher is often her students' sole mentor."

At the end of each lesson students are invited to write a kindness gram to someone they know -- a parent, a teacher, the librarian, or the bus driver -- who has done something to "make their day," Leach says. The idea of taking kindness grams to wounded soldiers dawned on Leach after being invited to teach her kindness curriculum to a class of German schoolchildren. Between now and May 22, when she leaves for Germany, Leach expects to have collected enough kindness grams to give at least one to every wounded soldier at Ramstein.

Wall's latest inspiration, the kindness coin, will go, too, though some soldiers may no doubt "spend" their currency before they leave the hospital. The coins, each about the size of a half dollar, bear Wall's compelling question on one side and the admonition "pass it on" on the other.

Wall hopes to raise enough money to buy at least 1,000 of the coins, though he admits he'd like to send more. There are already, he says, about 15,000 of the coins in circulation, with an increasing demand for more.

"The kindness movement started in 1993 and there's no sign of it slowing down," Wall says. "The coins are a nice reminder, especially for kids, that everything they see on the street is not all there is. They can choose. They can choose between violence and kindness."

Want to pass some kindness on to wounded troops in Germany or just want to know more about the kindness movement? Call 393-4471 or visit www.kindnessusa.org.