Camas Kindness Week: Local DECA Campaign a Major Success

Camas, WA — The Camas DECA Club organized a successful “Keep It Kind” public relations campaign this week, begining with getting the City Council to declare November 9 as a city-wide “Kindness Day” and ending with the signing of 1,000 Kindness contracts at Camas High School.

The objective of the campaign, which encompassed six schools, was to remind people that kindness matters, especially in the wake of school shootings in Parkland, FL and so many other schools and locations in the United States.

“Personally, I learned how important kindness is to so many people our community,” said Skylar Becerra, a DECA Club leader. “It’s a universal concept and the overwhelming support from everyone we came across gave was astounding and how so many people felt it was missing in our society.”

Kindness activities included the following:

• A red out (which ended up getting huge participation).
• Be the Change Club (Becerra’s and Amie Beld’s random acts of kindness club) holding all entrance doors open and when students came in we told them good morning and gave them a slip of paper with a kindness challenge to compliment two people in the next 10 minutes.
• At lunches club leaders walked around with contracts and bracelets and talked to people at tables.
• Had a booth set up at lunches and people could come up sign contracts and spin a wheel for different prizes while we talked about kindness.
• All the kindness contracts that were signed during the week were put on a wall, and people could go up and try to find theirs.
• Throughout the week, DECA worked with another student to promote writing letters to deployed troops and got the three biggest clubs to help participate.

“The Kindness Contract was a means to earn the Keep It Kind bracelets at the high school and in the community,” said Becerra. “At First Friday and all week at the high school during lunches we ran a booth and when people can up we told them what we are doing and a little about reminding them to be kind and had them sign a kindness contract to serve as a reminder to be kind and got the bracelet. We had 1,000 and ended up running out on Friday. We also had these hung on a wall at lunch.”