Hello Awesome Friends! My name is Lindsey and I am the Founder of World-Changing Kids (WCK). I want to reintroduce myself, as I feel I am at a new stage with WCK. I took a really important step in my personal growth and I wanted to share it with you. I recently fully embraced the description that I teach kids about social justice. Some of you might wonder why this is such a big step, you might have already thought that this is what I do. But this was a huge step for me. You see, I started World-Changing Kids back in 2015, when I wrote and published my book – “Plant a Garden of Kindness, A Child’s Guide to Filling a Year with Weekly Acts of Kindness”. The goal of this book is to help families build a friendlier community and empower kids to believe that they have the power to make the world a better place through kindness. The book is really a workbook, geared to kids ages 2 to 10, with 75 Acts of Kindness to choose from.
And while kindness is always important, and is at the foundation of everything I do at WCK, I have sort of organically grown the mission of WCK as my kids have grown – my kids are now 13 and 10. What I have discovered as they get older, and as all the awesome kids I get to interact with get older, is that these kids are hungry for real conversations, about real issues happening in the world – they want to be respected enough to be told the truth about all the different social justice issues. They want to talk about racism, refugees, homelessness, reconciliation, climate change, animal rights, residential schools, food insecurity, plastic pollution – really there isn’t a topic that is off limits.
But there were voices in my life that were telling me that if I go too far into the social justice wording, if I get too political, I will lose people. I will lose people on my personal Facebook page and I will lose people on my WCK pages, and perhaps in real life too. And I am a serious people pleaser – I do not want to lose people – so this terrified me. I would tone down my language and the things I shared so as not to offend anyone, not to upset them, not to lose them. I would hesitate to use my voice, to share what I really thought we need to do based on all the research and learning I have done. I kept looking to others to tell me what I should do. I have struggled with this for a long time.
However, after a lot of serious work on myself these last few months, which includes starting therapy and building an even stronger circle of amazing friends who support and believe in me (I am so grateful for this), and after a whole bunch of synchronicities and signs that have made me stop doubting that this is my purpose, I have fully owned the fact that my mission is to talk with kids about social justice issues and empower them with actions they can take to help makes things better in whatever issue they choose to focus on – whatever issue breaks their heart. I am no longer asking for approval or permission. I am trusting my heart and believing that I know what I need to do. And if I lose people, then I lose people. But I think that this clarity of vision will result in me reaching the people who really want to be part of what I am building. And to be honest, I have already seen this happening.
If after reading all this, you think that I have gone a bit too far down the social justice road and you feel that this is no longer for you, I am really OK with that. No hard feelings. I hope that maybe we can meet again someday. But if after reading this, you are like this is exactly what my kids and I are looking for, than I am super excited to have you here, and we are going to build something super amazing together.
Photo credit to my 10-year old daughter!