Michele in San Francisco with the Kindness Collective

ESD 112’s Michele Larsen was part of a national think tank on Kindness over the weekend in Half Moon Bay, California. She was there on behalf of the positive thought non-profit she runs called The Joy Team. The Kindness Collective, a group of 70 leading kindness organizations across the U.S., was convened by the Bay area’s KindnessEvolution. Thirty of the 70 organizations were represented at the first annual Collective along with youth ambassadors and a U.N. delegate from UNESCO (http://www.mgiep.unesco.org/) who flew in from New Delhi.  The mission of the group is to collaborate in ways that use the unique assets of their collective kindness organizations to achieve greater social impact.

The weekend produced five projects for the group to consider. Michele’s collaborative project with groups from California and Colorado is to explore creating a Kindness Lobby that would advocate on a state and national level to influence elected officials and look at pending legislation through a kindness filter. Other Kindness Collective projects include creating a media outlet and unifying curriculum for schools.

The list of organizations focusing on creating a kinder world can be found here: https://www.kindnessevolution.org/vendors/

The Joy Team has been keeping Michele quite busy lately (when she’s not working full time at the ESD). In May she’ll be headed to the Out of Home Media Conference and Expo where her Smile Across America campaign is one of three feel-good human interest campaigns to be featured with a video on the main stage on Tuesday, May 8th, in-between national brands keynotes like Twitter and Tito’s Vodka. Michele was invited to be in the room and introduced at this national conference.