Kayla Lamoreaux genuinely enjoys giving back. “I’m one of those people who always felt happy seeing other people happy,” she told Nice News. She’s also someone who’s struggled in her relationship with alcohol. So when Lamoreaux found herself newly sober during the pandemic, when much of America was running up their BevMo! bills, she decided to channel the energy and money she would have otherwise spent on the habit into something else: kindness.
“We would go out and pay for strangers’ groceries, or we would go volunteer and pick up trash or just do these different kinds of community service projects and random acts of kindness,” Lamoreaux said of herself and her now-husband. “I would leave little notes in places for people and things like that. And that’s just kind of how it got started.”
The “it” she’s referring to is Wildly Kind, the Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit Lamoreaux launched in 2022 — and the natural evolution of her passion project. Friends had gotten involved in her simple acts of kindness, and the word spread on social media that there was a newly formed group of people focused on brightening others’ days.
“I realized very quickly that there were dozens and dozens of people all over the world, really, who were reaching out saying, ‘How do I get involved in this?’” explained Lamoreaux. But grants are hard to come by, so the soon-to-be mother of two (her second is due in a couple months) had to think outside the box. That was how the most unique aspect of Wildly Kind was born, an ambassador program that gamifies kindness while engaging communities.
Here’s how it works: Interested parties join the program by signing up to contribute $20 a month. With their first donation, they’re sent a welcome kit stocked with kindness cards, tags, a badge, branded merchandise, and more — ”everything you need to feel empowered to take action in your community,” the website states.
In addition, ambassadors receive access to the Wildly Kind Ambassador app, where they can log their acts of kindness and connect with other community members. Also through the app, ambassadors can participate in exclusive giveaways and kindness challenges. Often, these challenges will involve materials sent from headquarters, a tangible result of their donations.
“The challenge this month is we will pay to send a bouquet of flowers to your house,” shared Lamoreaux when we spoke in October. “We want you to enjoy the bouquet of flowers for the first day or two, and then gift that bouquet of flowers to a loved one or to a stranger.”
She continued: “You may be giving us $20 a month, but after a certain point, you start seeing that money back because we’re offering these different acts of kindness to keep our ambassadors empowered and inspired as well.”
There are currently over 100 ambassadors around the globe, and they’ve been leading the charge in their communities and beyond. One ambassador who has connections in Jinga, a city in eastern Uganda, wanted to organize a shoe drive for some of the children there, so Wildly Kind fundraised to send her to the country. Donations they collected also went toward hot meals and 60 new pairs of shoes for the local kids, and in a later initiative, more money was raised to buy them soccer balls.
In addition to random acts of kindness, Wildly Kind runs social impact projects, like the phone booth pop-up it first put up in Portland and then across the country, in Chicago, Denver, and Minneapolis.
“We built a phone booth and we popped it up at a local festival, and we asked the public to step inside and leave a kind, anonymous message for a stranger who could be struggling,” Lamoreaux explained of the first incarnation. The team then made a video project out of it, collecting all the audio and posting it online.
The point, Lamoreaux explained, is to create free mental health resources for the public — essentially free daily affirmations that those who are in need can easily listen to and download. The initiatives were led by the Wildly Kind staff as well as ambassadors in the different cities.
“Especially just with the way the world is right now, and people feeling so disconnected from one another, I think these phone booths, and just this art project in itself, allows for a really unique opportunity for people to … connect to one another and offer words of support to one another on nothing other than just humanity, you know?” she shared.
“We’re not asking questions on affiliations, on status. None of that stuff. We are just asking you to put a kind message into the universe for someone who may need it,” Lamoreaux went on, “and communities have really stepped up.”
Interested in becoming a Wildly Kind Ambassador? Learn how to get involved.
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