Whitehorse students' 'kindness club' aims to brighten your day

Some Whitehorse students are doing what they can to make the city a nicer place — with a kindness club.

Earlier this week, the Golden Horn Elementary School's Kindness Club hit the streets to spread joy through random acts of kindness.

The club split into five groups and performed acts including holding a positive sign parade, paying for peoples' groceries at a local store, leaving sticky notes with uplifting messages on vehicles, and cleaning up garbage.

One group went to the Copper Ridge Place long term care home to draw sidewalk chalk pictures for the elders.

Another group went to the Alpine Vet clinic and donated money toward surgeries for animals in need.

A group also went to a walking trail to drop loonies and toonies along the trail for people to find.

The club is made up of Golden Horn students in Grades 4 to 7.

"The intent for it was for the kids to really think of innovative ways to cheer people up," said Elizabeth Churchill, a Grade 1 teacher at the school who runs the Kindness Club.

Churchill said that spreading kindness and smiles was more important than ever right now.

"We thought about this year being such a poignant time to work on that even more," she said.

Grade 6 student Hadley Callan was part of the group placing sticky notes and leaving money along the trail.

"I think it's really important to spread kindness when everyone's feeling upset, and lonely right now," Callan said.

"When you spread kindness you feel happy, it makes other people feel happy, and hopefully they'll spread kindness to other people to make Whitehorse smile for the day."

Raising funds with tote bags and colouring books

The group started meeting after school in February to brainstorm ideas they were passionate about.

Churchill said that no idea was a bad idea.

"One of our students talked about how when you're at Tim Hortons in line and someone pays for your coffee," she said.

"We just thought about how that would look on a bigger scale and we thought about an entire pay-it-forward field trip."

The Kindness Club raised a total of $500 to give back to the community.

"We fundraised through selling tote bags," Churchill explained.

Another teacher at the school used his artistic skills to create a colouring book with the students to sell.

"We sold those to the primary kids for a toonie each," Churchill said.

The majority of the money came from the Golden Horn school council's "Dream Big, Big Idea" fund. It's designed to help finance ideas pitched by students or clubs.

"The school council gave us, I think, $300 toward that which was amazing," Churchill said.

"We really appreciate [that]."