The 9-12 year old Roots & Shoots group at Roger Williams Park Zoo has created The Kindness Challenge project with the goal of promoting kind behavior in their school communities while inspiring classmates to be kind to each other and the Earth every day.
First, each Roots & Shoots member had to ask permission to host The Kindness Challenge in either their classroom at school or with an extracurricular group, such as Boy Scouts. Then, everyone created a Kindness Calendar--an advent-style calendar that contained a weekly idea of how to be kind, such as "switch off all the lights when you leave a room" or "give a classmate a compliment". The idea is to read the kind idea and then challenge their peers to complete it in a certain amount of time. To keep track, each member also made a Kindness Cup, so if a peer does the challenge, they can write how they completed it and put it in the cup. Before the next kind idea is read, members can count how many of their peers did the previous challenge and add an extra challenge of having more people complete it next time!
