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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Where I #FindKind

Kindness is such an important word. I asked my 7 year old daughter what kindness meant to her. The question stumped her: First she told me kindness meant “respect”; then she told me kindness meant “to be nice.” From her body language, I knew she wasn’t feeling any emotional connection to this word whatsoever – just trying to find the right answer for mom. So I asked again and I just loved her answer: “Does it mean filling up someone else’s bucket?” Lovely.

Kindness can mean so many different things. Kindness is connected to action. Acts of kindness are small things done in our daily lives to make others’ lives a little bit easier and a little bit happier. Kindness is a way of being, such as the concept of “soft eyes” that an Elder in Northwest Territories taught me was important for how we look at every child and each other. So empathy is part of kindness too. And kindness can be as simple as noticing the kind things that are happening all around us every day.

In this month’s bulletin, we have explored different meanings and ways of practicing “kind”: Nancy Gibson, our February Champion, makes kindness an active practice that permeates her professional and personal life. Alberta Education calls readers to make kindness their 2015 resolution. Our Communications Assistant Ben shares his original comic: The Adventures of Captain Kindness, featuring an ordinary kid showing extraordinary kindness. And our partners join the conversation by offering insightful responses to the question “What does kindness mean to you?” As we celebrate kindness throughout the month of February through Random Acts of Kindness Week (February 9-15) and Pink Shirt Day (February 25), I encourage you to also look for kindness in everyday interactions, to be present in the moment and always looking for ways to nurture kindness with ourselves and with others. To #FindKind.

– by Susan Hopkins, Ed.D., Executive Director

THE SOCIETY FOR SAFE AND CARING SCHOOLS & COMMUNITIES

NEWS BULLETIN February 2015

telephone: 780.822.1500email: office@safeandcaring.caweb: www.safeandcaring.camail: 11010 142 St., Edmonton, AB T5N 2R1

www.facebook.com/SafeAndCaring

The Society for Safe and Caring Schools & Communities

@SafeAndCaring Safe and Caring is a centre that fosters effective networks and partnerships to improve the quality of life for all of Alberta’s children.

FEATURED EVENTS

love • caring • divinity • empathy • generosity • considerate • elusive • joy • trust • safe • honour • feeling • connection • spirit • sensitivity • respect • action • nurture • smile • play • hug • friend • giving • valued • gesture • comment • compassionate • genuine • inspiration • understanding • positivity • words • thoughtful • resolution • practice • welcoming • mindfulness • love • caring •divinity • empathy • generosity • considerate • elusive • joy • trust • safe • honour • feeling • connection • spirit • sensitivity • respect • action • nurture • smile • play • hug • friend • giving • valued • gesture • comment • compassionate • genuine • inspiration • understanding • positivity • words • thoughtful • resolution • practice • welcoming • mindfulness • love • caring • divinity •empathy • generosity • considerate • elusive • joy • trust • safe • honour • feeling • connection • spirit • sensitivity • respect • action • nurture • smile • play • hug • friend • giving • valued • gesture • comment • compassionate • genuine • inspiration • understanding • positivity • words • thoughtful • resolution • practice • welcoming • mindfulness • love • caring • divinity • empathy • generosity • considerate • elusive • joy • trust • safe • honour • feeling • connection • spirit • sensitivity • respect • action •

empathy

#FindKind?Where do you

Visit www.safeandcaring.ca/special-events to view more upcoming events!

• February 16 / Family DayJoin Safe and Caring as we celebrate families across Alberta

• February 25 / Pink Shirt DaySafe and Caring, iSMSS, Alberta Education and ATB Financial collaborated to create and share an infographic celebrating Pink Shirt Day! Check it out on our website.

• February 9-15 / Random Acts of Kindness WeekStep out of your normal routine and attempt a new random act of kindness each day. Check in on Twitter with @SafeAndCaring for stories and ideas!

• February 19-20 / iLearn, iTeach, iLead: PalliserDistrict Teachers’ ConventionSafe and Caring will present on What’s New in the Education Act

• February 26-27 / Greater Edmonton Teachers’ConventionSafe and Caring will present on Supporting LGBTQ Students & What’s New in the Education Act

• March 5-6 / Building Bridges: Mighty PeaceTeachers’ ConventionSafe and Caring will present on a School-Wide Approach to Building Healthy Relationships and Supporting Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

• March 11-13 / Community ConferencingFacilitator Training WorkshopSafe and Caring is partnering with Engage Consulting to deliver this workshop on using restorative practices to resolve conflict.

Siena Hopkins-PrestDaughter, 7 years old “Kindness is filling up someone else’s bucket.”

YOUTH PERSPECTIVES: Introducing Captain Kindness

Nancy Gibson is one of the newest members of Safe and Caring’s Board of Directors. Nancy brings to Safe and Caring over 50 years of experience serving communities around the world in a multitude of different roles – as a nurse and, later, medical researcher in Sierra Leone; as a community leader and volunteer for numerous Edmonton-based NGOs; as a community wellness and research facilitator for the Tlicho community in the Northwest Territories; as the Science Director for the Canadian Circumpolar Institute; and as a Senior Researcher for CIET Canada.

Nancy started her academic career after her children had grown. While Chair of the Department of Human Ecology, she was able to combine her experience as a nurse, volunteer and community leader with her training as an anthropologist, to develop courses and research initiatives to reframe how students, researchers and medical personnel approached community studies.

Based on her years of experience serving communities, Nancy had come to realize that the “expert model,” where an external individual or an organization comes into a community, hands out pamphlets and uses their expertise in one particular area to tell that community what they need, simply doesn’t work. When developing her courses for community studies, Nancy “sought models for integrated and responsive community programming, responsive community-based research, so that the people in the communities were engaged. Engaging the community to help identify their priorities, design how to do the research in the community to learn more about the issues, and to decide what outcomes would best meet their needs.”

This is the model that Nancy has spent the past two decades developing, practicing and promoting, both through her academic career, as well as her ongoing community and humanitarian service. In this work, she has handed off her label as an “expert” for one she much prefers, that of “facilitator.”

Permeating all of Nancy’s professional and volunteer work, as well as her personal relationships as a wife, mother, grandmother, friend and mentor, is the principle of loving kindness. For example, one of the most important elements of Nancy’s work as a facilitator is building kind and trusting relationships within the communities she serves: a practice that leads to interesting and innovative results. Nancy cultivates kindness in her life by making it an active practice, taking time each morning to commit to making at least one kind act, and then at night, reflecting on the kindness she has experienced throughout the day and how she had acknowledged it. This mindful approach not only helps prioritize kindness, but also trains us to recognize and appreciate the kindness that others show.

According to Nancy, the benefits of practicing kindness are rewarding: “I believe this is how I am learning, and this is how I am becoming a better person, a role model for my family; this is how my relationships, friendships, my marriage become richer. It feeds my soul.”

– by Meaghan Trewin, Communications Coordinator

CHAMPIONS OF A SAFE AND CARING WORLD: Dr. Nancy Gibson, PhD

No. 1: Sharing is Caring

Nancy Gibson, PhDMember, Safe and Caring Board Senior Researcher, CIETProfessor Emeritus & Former Chair, Dept. of Human Ecology, University of AlbertaFormer Science Director, Circumpolar Institute “Kindness is conscious caring for yourself and others.”

– February’s Youth Perspective is brought to us by Ben Tsang, our talented and creative Communications Assistant. Archived comics will be housed on our website at www.safeandcaring.ca/captain-kindness.

Ha, he’s so poor he can’t even afford shoes. What a loser.

Here!

Did you make a new year’s resolution? It’s still early in 2015, so let’s be optimistic and assume you are still on track with your plan. Common resolutions include losing weight, exercising more, getting out of debt and helping others. Did you include one of these? The good news is that research indicates if you made a formal resolution, you are ten times more likely to make improvements than someone who didn’t make a resolution and that if you share your resolution with a friend you are 33% more successful than those who didn’t.

Let’s consider the resolution: “helping others.” With Random Acts of Kindness Week as a focal point for February, we have a wonderful opportunity to make or renew our resolution to help others. It started in a California restaurant in 1982 when Anne Herbert scrawled “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” on a placemat. Since then, the Random Acts of Kindness movement has inspired schools, communities and organizations worldwide to choose to show kindness to others with no expectation of reward. And it appears that the more kindness is paid forward, the healthier and safer communities become.

Many schools in Alberta embrace the opportunity to practice random acts of kindness. This focus builds on the government’s recently released Alberta’s Plan for Promoting Healthy Relationships and Preventing Bullying and Alberta Education’s commitment to ensuring our schools are Welcoming, Caring, Respectful and Safe Learning Environments. This webpage has information and resources that help enable schools to implement strategies to support healthy relationships. With a whole school approach, students are in environments where showing kindness is valued and encouraged. Research confirms that people who perform acts of kindness feel positive emotions and are happier. It also shows that happy people

become happier by counting their acts of kindness for one week. Through this subjective counting, they also become kinder and more grateful. This is the very thing that can promote and support positive mental health for participants, including children and young people.

Children and youth who are mentally healthy are more likely to build healthy relationships, value diversity and demonstrate respect, empathy and compassion. Alberta Education’s Mental Health Matters webpage promotes positive mental health with a series of tools and resources, including posters and activity guides.

Promoting healthy relationships and showing kindness builds a positive school culture which can help prevent bullying. It was a random act of kindness at Central Kings Rural High School in Nova Scotia when two Grade 12 students organized the wearing of pink shirts. It began when a Grade 9 student, on his first day at the school, wore a pink polo shirt. Some of his peers publicly mocked him for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up. David Shepherd and Travis Price decided to take action. They went to a discount store and bought 50 pink shirts. They emailed classmates to invite them to join the action. The next day, not only did

dozens of students wear the pink shirts David and Travis brought, but hundreds of students showed up wearing their own pink clothes. Since then, schools, communities and organizations across Canada have participated in Pink Shirt Day by encouraging people to wear pink as both a proactive message of support for those who have experienced bullying and as a demonstration of a commitment to refrain from bullying behaviours.

Alberta Education remains committed to bullying prevention in Alberta’s schools and communities and the Government of Alberta provides information and resources on the Bully Free Alberta website.

Let’s join together in supporting both Random Acts of Kindness Week (February 9-15) and Pink Shirt Day (February 25). We can make a difference in 2015 – for ourselves, our schools, our communities and the world.

–

ACTS OF KINDNESS from Alberta Education { }

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

– Margaret Mead

February’s Guest Perspective is by the School and Community Supports for Children and Youth Branch, Alberta Education

David RustDirector of Community Partnerships,Safe and Caring

“It is the unexpected kindnesses that mean the most to me. The quiet smile shared on the face of a person with little to smile about... a child wanting to play and visit in the checkout line at the grocery store... and the hug of a friend who knows better than you do when you need it most.”

OUT AND ABOUT: David Rust asked “What Does Kindness Mean to You?”

Rohan NuttalMember, Safe and Caring AdvisoryExecutive Director,Student Voice Initiative Canada

Kindness is enigmatic, sometimes elusive. It is that which pays homage to the Promethean torch. The ‘fruit of the spirit’ that emboldens, inspires and fortifies the human condition.”

Fern Snart, PhD Dean, Faculty of Education,University of Alberta

“Kindness is taking the time for the seemingly small things: clearing a sidewalk to help someone for whom that is difficult, making eye-contact and smiling at someone who might be often by-passed, and touching the hand of someone who is suffering, when there are no words that would do.”

Kelsey NowaczynskiTeacher,Dan Knott Junior High School

“...Kindness is reaching out and seeing each person as they are. It can be as simple as similing hello, asking how someone’s day is or going above and beyond to make someone’s experience better.”

Curtis GreenlandDirector of Education,Pixel Blue College “To me, kindness is a gesture, an act or comment that you choose to cultivate with the people around you.”

Alex DraperDonor Grants Associate,Edmonton Community Foundation

“Kindness is the result of true empathy. Truly understand how someone else is feeling and why they’re feeling that way and you will only want to respond positively, with kindness.”

Barry DavidsonVP, Safe and Caring Board Senior Advisor to the Deputy Minister,Municipal Affairs

“Kindness is the culmination of the great attributes humans have to offer – empathy, honour, trust, considerate, generous and love.”

Lori RoeMSW RSW Care Manager, School Based Mental Health, Alberta Health Services

“What does kindness mean to me... David Rust! Truly. Kindness is about doing for others purely for the joy of doing, not about the gains. Kindness is acknowledging a job well done... Kindness is working together and enjoying the connection.”

Josh TraptowMember, Safe and Caring Board Communications Advisor,Alex Community Health Centre “Treating everyone with respect regardless of their circumstances.”

Glynnis A. Lieb, PhDExecutive Director,Lieutenant Governor’s Circle on Mental Health and Addiction

“Kindness – to me – means being compassionate, genuinely interested and always aiming to be empowering those with whom you interact.”

Dr. Bob WestburyChief Advisor, Relations & Innovation, Edmonton Capital Region, TELUS “See the divinity in everyone.”

“Kindness – treating others well, the way you would want to be treated, doing things that make a difference without expectation of return, just because you can. A smile, a kind action or word passed on can lift spirits and create a climate of good things to happen.”

Hon. Dave Hancock, QCFormerly: Premier of Alberta

Keray HenkeTreasurer, Safe and Caring Board Formerly: Deputy Minister,Alberta Education

“Kindness means anticipating and responding to someone else’s needs, even before your own. Kindness means giving of yourself so that someone else can feel safe, secure and valued.”