Building Kind Communities Together
We are dedicated to building kind communities for the benefit of all people. Through meetings, dinners, conferences, and family events, we create spaces for people to connect with a shared intention of making more kindness in the world.
Community-Led Meetings
We offer community-led meetings for people to build kind communities, practical resources and systems of support together, with regularly scheduled times that take place in person and online, and the spaces and collaboration tools that support them.
Meetings are community-led by those who attend. Attendees maintain and update our community guidelines and relational agreements that function to protect people’s rights. This enables people to safely build the infrastructure that make kind communities possible.
Connection Between Meetings
Our meetings maintain a private messaging platform and a dedicated video meeting space available 24/7 that members can access anytime to exchange kind help and offer support to one another in everyday life.
This infrastructure creates opportunities for connection for people who are geographically isolated, disabled, or facing other barriers to building more kind community in person.
Connection with Community
Community toolkit workshops, kind community meetings, community dinners, family events, and quarterly conferences are open to all of our members.
Kind Help Exchange
Kind Help Exchange is a community exchange where people can ask for help, offer help, and respond to one another's needs. There are three ways community members can participate:
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Ask for help: Make a request when there is something you could use help with.
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Respond to a request: Let someone know when you think you may be able to help.
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Offer help: Share something you are generally available to contribute. For example: “I enjoy cooking and am sometimes available to make an extra meal for someone!”
Someone might need help moving furniture, someone to walk their dog, or company while doing a hard task. Someone else might have time, knowledge, skills, resources, or practical help they would be glad to contribute. Kind Help Exchange connects people’s needs with the kind help others are available to offer.
This exchange is different from a time bank. Kind help is freely contributed, not earned or owed. There are no credits, hours or balances to keep. The exchange works because community members contribute when they have capacity and request support when they need it. Receiving help does not create a debt and contributing help does not create a claim on future help.
How to Join
We screen newcomers for safety concerns and conflicts of interest. We offer an orientation for new people where we review our community guidelines, ask what people hope to find in community, and consider together whether our meetings are a good fit.
Foundations of Kindness
Kindness
By kindness, we mean: noticing when someone (including ourselves) has a need that isn't being met, and responding with care, curiosity, and respect.
Dignity
Dignity acknowledges living beings as existing and recognizes every person has their own experiences, needs, and interests. Dignity is inherent––it exists whether or not others recognize it, and it cannot be earned or lost. We learn about our own dignity by being treated with dignity.
Respect
Respect is how the recognition of dignity is acted upon. It is the expression of dignity through behavior that acknowledges and protects the boundaries, needs, and interests of living beings. We learn respect by having our own boundaries recognized.
Rights
Rights are the conditions that must be protected if dignity is to be respected. Some rights concern our relationship with ourselves. These are inner rights. Other rights concern how we relate with others. These are social rights. Our rights exist whether we are consciously aware of them, or not. Our rights still exist, even when they are being violated.
When rights are not fully protected because of conditions that constrain autonomy––our rights then function to orient us toward what needs protection.
Building Blocks of Kind Communities
Kind behavior
Kindness happens when a person wants to see another person’s unmet need, and takes action to understand it or meet it. Without transaction, without cost, but just for the sake of being kind.
Kind formats
Without the protection of a kind environment, kindness between individuals is not enough! Relationships and social environments require infrastructure that actively cultivates kindness.
We intentionally create formats for building relationships and social environments that foster our ability to connect in ways that are mutually protected and secure, and that value the agency of each person while building functional community.
Kind culture
Rather than depending on a few exceptionally kind individuals, we ask: How do we build communities where kindness is the norm? How do people learn kindness if it was never modeled for them? How do people practice kindness when they do not yet feel safe enough to do so? Kind communities are the social conditions that make rights increasingly practicable. Our efforts here are creating culture where kindness is supported, dependable, and transformative.
Kindness can be built into the fabric of our relationships, communities, and systems. We are working to create the conditions under which kindness becomes reliable, and where the dignity, agency, needs, interests, and boundaries of every person are consistently protected.
Functional Communities
What becomes possible with kindness
When someone in the community is sick, other community members could send good wishes. Or, in a functional community, community members can arrange the help for driving them to urgent care, sitting with them at the appointment, picking up their medication, or making them a meal.
When a family welcomes a new baby, faces an illness or job loss, or takes on new caregiving responsibilities, the whole household may need support. Functional communities can help arrange meal trains, childcare, or help navigating resources.
What makes kindness functional?
Functional communities can accommodate all of these possibilities, and create opportunities that none of us could create alone––where individuals, households, and families can enjoy activities together, and share support through hard times.
Functional community enriches the lives of all people and people give and receive in different ways over time. The purpose of our activities is to help people build more functional and kind communities together.
Our Charitable Mission
Kind Community Meetings is a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code stewarding emergency hardship funds for a charitable class of members of our community in need.
Finances should never be a barrier to kindness or community. All of our meetings are free, and admission to our ticketed events is pay-what-you-can, with no explanation of financial hardship required.
Our meetings are community-led with no religious affiliation or political affiliation. We are just people who share an intention of kindness.
Hanuman
For a long time I searched for ways to feel better inside. I served in the military and I offered selfless service in underserved communities, hoping that helping others could help me find freedom and peace in my own life. While that service made a meaningful difference for many people––I still felt isolated and that something was missing.
Eventually, I turned to mountain climbing. I thought that reaching the top of a mountain might make me feel whole or at least help me escape the anguish I was carrying. For a long time I needed extreme challenges just to feel something beyond the weight I was living with.
But even on mountaintops, I realized I was still missing what I needed most: people. I wasn't finding the kind of relationships where I could truly belong, build community, and walk through life alongside others. More than another achievement, I just needed kind people around me. Healing doesn't happen in isolation. It happens when we feel seen, valued, and connected to others.
That's why I am committed to helping build the kind of community I wish I had when I needed it most. My hope is to bring people together, help them feel welcome, and create spaces where everyone belongs. I believe that when people care for one another, extraordinary things become possible.
Will
As a social worker, people kept referring out their most traumatized folks to me, and so I ended up with more people than I could help––because I'm just one guy. So, it occurred to me that I needed to build community around my folks. I needed to make opportunities where they could do mutual aid, and they could become each other's emergency contacts and share meals and build kindness together. Many people coming to me for help needed family, community, and belonging––which has led me to shift my focus from helping individuals one at a time to building the conditions that allow people to support one another in community.
As life becomes more difficult, more people are being told to seek therapy for their suffering––but many of their struggles stem from isolation and a lack of meaningful support. Most people just need connection, not treatment.
Real help takes a village, and if we want sustainable support, we need to build that village. A healthy community requires structure. My efforts here are focused on creating the frameworks, formats, and systems that make it possible for people with differences to feel safe, connected, and in community together.
Raising my disabled daughter, I have learned that visible disabilities like down syndrome are acknowledged in ways that more invisible disabilities such as the effects of trauma are not. I want to change that and make kindness and acceptance accessible for all.
Meet the Team
Elaine
I am art teacher. What I love about teaching is advocating for kids and giving them a voice. I am also an inner-kid advocate for all humans with developmental trauma. I like to give kids a voice and help them have freedom of expression.
I am also an artist. I like to provide kind community arts workshops where people who have never tried art get a chance to experience what it’s like to work with different mediums. Art has always been the only thing that has never left me, and that I could always turn to for help. When I don’t have words, I can express through art––and I want to give that gift to other people too.
Growing up I never had any visibility as a person. There was nowhere for me to turn to for help growing up––even through adulthood. It wasn’t until I found peer-support spaces that I was able to feel seen and experience chosen family, connecting with others intentionally focused on kindness who, like me, were struggling with feeling invisible.
My hope is that I can be a safe advocate of new experiences for those who are struggling to find kind community. I want to offer art as a tool to bring people together and encourage people to be brave and try new experiences like I did, because that’s how I found my chosen family.
Lance
I'm an organizer and social worker looking forward to making friends and building community. I started off providing support to people in crisis through peer-to-peer, youth-led crisis support and street outreach, when I was in high school. After 20 years spent doing mutual aid, community organizing, street outreach, community education, and harm reduction / case management / crisis work, I decided to get my MSW and completed clinical training in a workforce development program focused on developing clinicians to serve in our county's public mental health system.
Although I am grateful for both the knowledge and the access that my social work training and license has afforded me, I also struggle daily with internal conflict about the ways in which becoming a "professional" holds me back, separates me from my communities, and implicates me non-consensually in actions and processes that I perceive to be harmful to myself, my community, and to those I serve.
I still have not figured out whether or not I think social work can fit within my personal value system; however, my professional training has never been the important part of how I show up. I think that what I learned as a youth supporting my friends and community in struggle has been what best prepared me for the work I do to support others today -- whether I am doing that work in a professionalized setting, or as an organizer, a friend, a neighbor, or any other role or context that might arise. I am grateful to be able to support my friends and community in these efforts.