No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
It's Friday, so you know what that means...yes, the weekend is here, but it's also time for our weekly round-up of inspiring acts of kindness from all around the country. And this week's batch of heartwarming stories is sure to help you start the first weekend of summer with a smile on your face.
In one story, a young girl couldn't believe her fellow shoppers weren't putting their cars away, so she stepped up to help out one of the store's employees, while a woman created a new invention to help physically reunite her parents who had been separated for three months due to COVID-19. Warning: you will need tissues!
And in a story that is impossible to find delight in, an anonymous donor decided to give a group of students the ultimate gift on Zoom call, helping to alleviate their debts.
Here are six acts of kindness to head into the weekend with...
Imagine hopping on a Zoom call to reunite with fellow former students and learning all of your college debt had been paid off.
That's exactly what happened when a group with Students Rising Above had a virtual meeting when the nonprofit's CEO Elizabeth Devaney appeared on the call to drop the ultimate surprise.
"What I want to share with you today is that anonymous SRA donors have presented us with a remarkable gift—donations up to $8 million with the intent to eliminate student loan debt on more than 400 students," she shared.
Screams of excitement and tears of joy quickly followed. "Are you kidding me?" one student is overheard asking while another can't help but freak out. "You're going to make me cry today," another added.
A young girl in North Carolina couldn't believe that people didn't put their carts away after shopping at Walmart, so she spent 30 minutes helping CJ, an employee, push them back to the store.
- "That's what we're supposed to do," Ryleigh said of helping out, per goodnews_movement's original post. "We are supposed to be kind."
The next time Ryleigh was at the Walmart, she once again pushed carts back and ran into CJ, who later found her in the store and gave her a card and gift card. "Your hard work meant a lot to me, he wrote. Ryleigh then went and hugged CJ and the two snapped this photo, which we hope you think about every single time you are about to leave your cart in the middle of a parking lot.
After months of lockdown due to COVID-19, Cindy Shinabarger wanted to find a special way to help her parents re-connect on Mother's Day, getting approval from her memory care facility to install a Safe Hug Window so they could embrace for the first time in months.
The Safe Hug Window has since become a permanent fixture at the Hope Center Memory Care Facility in Fayetteville, Georgia, where her mother, Jan Glass, lives after being diagnosed with dementia.
"What started out as a Mother's Day gift and has become meaningful to all who have used it," Shinabarger, who has a background in aerospace engineering , told E!. "I've been blown away by the responses I've gotten, several with tears in their eyes."
18-year-old Mikiiya Foster organized a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in her small hometown of Simi Valley, bringing in thousands of people despite receiving threats of violence from social media trolls and a request from a local elected official to reconsider her plan to hold the march.
An estimated 2,000 people showed up for the June 6 protest, with Foster telling E!, "I couldn't believe it. I mean, in the beginning of the protest, I honestly couldn't see how far back it went because I was up near Chase Bank, so I could only see that small corner. That itself I was just like, 'Oh my God. What is happening? Did I do this? How did I?'
Though she had no prior experience in community organizing, the teenager felt inspired to act after seeing people take action across the country, and has planned another Foster announced her next event, a "peaceful march" to be held on June 19 (aka Juneteenth, the day slavery finally ended in the United States).
"We still have to be careful because of COVID-19, but we're going to do something because this movement is far from done," she told E!.
To help celebrate her parents' 67th anniversary from afar, Tamra Futrell hired Daniel Morris to serenade the couple outside of their home in California.
"They met when she was 15," Morris captioned a video of the grand gesture, "and she used to play violin in orchestra. He would take her to all her practices and sit in the audience listening."
In the video, the couple gets emotional as Morris plays the viola for them in their front yard. #truelove is one of the hashtags Morris used and we couldn't agree more.
Never forget to be kind to yourself and let little Ayaan be the ultimate reminder of that.
In a video that went viral after his mother posted it back in October 2019, Ayaan repeated his morning affirmation to himself on his walk to school: "I am smart. I am blessed. I can do anything."
"I taught Ayaan this positive affirmation on his 2nd Birthday last year. In hopes that he would one day memorize it, understand it and use it as a motivational tool whenever he needed it," she captioned the video on Instagram. "Well he shocked me this morning. Out of no where he started repeating it, so I pulled out my phone. He ended (with enthusiasm lol) once we made it to our destination."