The longest lasting effects from middle and high school are how people treated you and how you may have treated them. For four years, we lived in a world where all that mattered was what you looked like, how much money you had and who you hung out with. You were judged for saying something, wearing something, going somewhere or doing something simply because it didn’t fit the norm everyone was so desperately trying to uphold. In this world, it may have felt like you had to be mean to survive.
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No film has portrayed this world as well as Mean Girls did. We all knew a Regina George, had an Aaron Samuels, a Janice Ian and a Cady Heron. Maybe you were one of them. They were all subject to a cruel world.
The Kind Campaign wants to change this world.
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In 2009, Pepperdine University students Lauren Paul and Molly Thompson bonded over their similar experiences of female bullying. They decided enough was enough and created The Kind Campaign. The campaign aims to create change by giving women a platform to speak out about girl-against-girl bullying. Originally just an idea for a documentary, this revolutionary idea has become a movement empowering young women all over the world.
Since its establishment, The Kind Campaign has hosted eleven international anti-bullying campaigns and hundreds of school assemblies across the country. The campaign encompasses several different platforms to get the message out, including school assemblies and events, social media, curriculums, and fundraisers.
A survey taken by girls after a Kind assembly showed that 96% of them felt the need to be more kind to other girls, 87% felt happier, 90% said they did not want to participate in gossip anymore, and 86.6% of girls felt like a better person.
Little by little, the Kind Campaign is turning the Regina’s of the halls into Cady-post-plastic. And that is pretty fetch.
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