Kindness club accentuates the positive

In the Trone Student Center, you pick up a note with a handwritten message of encouragement. Walking across campus, you’re handed a colorful little bag filled with treats. A friend calls or texts simply to say they care about you. These may be small gestures, but such acts of random kindness can brighten a stressed-out student’s day – and might even change the world, said Alice Tyszka ’25.

“To me, kindness means just meeting people where they’re at and doing something that can bring them up a little bit,” said Tyszka, founder and president of Furman’s Acts of Random Kindness (ARK) Club. “It can be something so simple, like holding the door open for someone or giving a compliment to a friend.”

Tyszka founded the ARK Club with a mission to “uplift all students and staff within Furman University, as well as members of our community, through random acts of kindness.” She brought the idea with her from Clover, South Carolina, where she had been president of her high school’s ARK Club, part of a nationwide network.

“There’s nothing quite like it,” said Tyszka, an English major on the writing track who is minoring in visual strategy. “I thought, ‘I want to see this on campus.’ And once the proposal was approved, it was just a matter of deciding who was going to join me on that journey.”

Tyler Tewell ’25 soon joined as vice president. ARK’s leaders for the 2023-2024 academic year will also include Brock Eastman ’25, Kaia McMullen ’27, Rutu Patel ’25, Alysha Matthews ’24 and Sarah Chingwena ’27. The club’s GroupMe community has grown to about 70 members, Tyszka said.

One of the club’s biggest events so far has been “Giving the Gift of Kindness,” where members assembled gift bags filled with treats and friendly notes, then spread out across campus to hand them to any students, staff or faculty they happened to pass by.

“It’s a great way to uplift somebody’s day,” said Tyszka. “We normally do it around stressful times like midterms or finals, just to lift the campus energy and bring some goodness onto the campus.”

She said “Giving the Gift of Kindness” has been working, and recalled an Instagram message from a student who had been handed a bag during exam season.

“The letter in her bag told her ‘Don’t worry about finals; you’re more than your academic achievements,’” said Tyszka. “And she told us, ‘I really needed that. You all made me feel so much better about everything that I was doing and just reminded me that I’m a human.’ It’s such a great experience to be able to share that we’re not always perfect, and we’re just doing our best, and that’s good enough.”

Although ARK’s members are certainly touching other students, they are also enhancing their own skills in everyday leadership that they can use after graduation, said the group’s advisor, Caroline Davis, a visiting assistant professor of theatre arts.

“Events like these celebrate leadership as the everyday act of improving others’ lives in small but meaningful ways,” Davis said.

Students can exchange encouraging notes in the Acts of Random Kindness mailbox in the Trone Student Center. / Credit: Alice Tyszka ’25

In the coming year, ARK will also continue the “Take a Note, Leave a Note” initiative it launched in Spring 2023, encouraging students to stop by a special mailbox in the student center’s Print and Post Express (P2X) while they pick up their regular mail.

“We had P2X set up a table where students could take a note or leave a note,” Tyszka said. “It’s something students can do easily whenever they want, and it’s a great way to spread or receive kindness.”

During Summer 2023, Tyszka and the rest of the ARK leadership team are excited to plan the next year of spreading positivity across campus – and they’re happy to get more students involved.

“The students have some great new ideas for this coming year, including more outreach initiatives and social events, which can only continue to add to Furman’s mental health efforts and its commitment to student belonging,” Davis said. “Our activities will continue to promote a broader sense of community throughout the university.”