Great Kindness Challenge App NAESP

We’re gearing up for the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) conference in Nashville later this week. In our preparations for the event, like all events, we reached out to the exhibitors to start some preview stories ahead of time. One of those with Great Kindness Challenge, from Kids For Peace Global.

In our morning editorial meeting we decided, without any research, we were going to reach out to them even though their description said nothing about an app, but not only does Kids For Peace Global have an app for The Great Kindness Challenge, that app has sparked 27 million acts of kindness through 554,486 students in 1099 schools. Take a second to digest that math.

The Great Kindness Challenge is proudly presented by Kids for Peace, a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides a platform for young people to actively engage in socially conscious leadership, community service, arts, environmental stewardship and global friendship.

Sounds novel enough, but with today’s active, and tech focused student, of virtually any age, how does that transcend in the modern classroom?

Well, the folks at Kids for Peace have created an app that’s available in the iTunes app store. The app prompts students to complete 50 acts of kindness. The acts of kindness are really easy, but to some they mean so much. Hug your friend, hold the door open for someone, say thank you to the crossing guard, are just some of the suggestions that the app offers.

The app gets kids into the habit of doing nice things and being kind to each other, and at the same time it gamifies the experience by allowing kids to keep track of the acts that they’ve done. The intention is that every participant does all 50 things during the Great Kindness Challenge week at their school.

“The intentions of the Great Kindness Challenge and the app are pure and simple: we want to encourage students to practice kindness and focus on the power of positive action. ” the company told us in an interview.

You may think that driving 27 million acts of kindness across over half a million students requires a huge staff, well Kids For Peace was started in 2006 by one mom, Jill McManigal. Asia Moore joined McManigal as their second staff member a few years ago. They have lots of volunteers and of course teachers, faculty, administrators and school staff help to make sure the challenge week is a huge success.

Kids For Peace will be exhibiting at the NAESP conference later this week in Nashville, hopefully recruiting as many principals as possible to get their schools into the Great Kindness Challenge. Moore and McManigal are hoping to have 2,000,000 students from 5,000 schools perform over 100,000,000 acts of kindness this year.

If you’re at NAESP you can check them out at booth #546. You can actually download the app now here, and check it out.