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S&R communities take on 1,000 Acts of Kindness challenge
‘I think what this really did was make people think more about the things they were doing every day’
6/14/2019
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Deron Hamel
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Most of us do kind things for others every day without even thinking about it. But what if we took time to reflect on our kind deeds and bring a “kindness wave” to our workplace culture?
That was the idea behind the 1,000 Acts of Kindness challenge the Steeves & Rozema Group issued to its long-term care and seniors living communities from mid-March to mid-April.
Everyone, including residents, their families and staff members, was encouraged to participate.
The idea for the initiative came from a presentation hosted by business consultant Laurie Flasko that team leaders attended. Laurie encourages organizations to incorporate kindness into their culture by participating in the 1,000 Acts of Kindness challenge.
The challenge’s goal is to make S&R long-term care and seniors living communities, as well as communities at large, better places to live and work.
A qualifying act of kindness could be literally any kind act.
At the Village on the Thames, one team member took her grandchildren out for ice cream. The Chatham-Kent senior living community’s fun co-ordinator, Tina Drew, was at a Tim Hortons drive-thru one day and bought a coffee and a bagel for the customer in the car behind her.
Each time a team member performed a kind gesture, it was tallied. A large paper thermometer kept track and the “mercury” would rise with every act.
The Village on the Thames team reached 894 acts of kindness when the challenge ended April 19.
Although short of the goal of reaching 1,000, Tina says many acts of kindness probably went unrecorded because it was difficult for some team members to write down the acts of kindness they were doing – to them, they were most often everyday occurrences.
But eventually people got on board and the numbers started adding up. Tina says she made a point of asking people, “what did you do that was kind today?”
“I think what this really did was make people think more about the things they were doing every day,” Tina says.
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