The Measurable Power of Kindness: How Small Acts Created an 18% Profit Boost and a 65% Drop in Violence
18% increase in profits – the measurable impact of kindness in organizations.
Curtis Bennett calls himself a lobbyist for kindness. He runs the nonprofit One Kind Act a Day and he believes he can change the world for the better.
Their kindness program turned a particularly violent Division of Juvenile Justice facility from having a riot two weeks before they started to a 65% reduction of violence in 30 days and eventually zero incidents after 60 days – and going 6 months without a single incident.
“ As we stop and take inventory of the kindnesses that people have exhibited towards us over the years, we realize, a lot of people have been very good to me over the years and I need to try and reciprocate in the best possible way.”
Kindness matters in the workplace, in civic life, in the home, in every facet of our lives. He shares some practical tips on how to reintroduce kindness into our lives.
Take the pledge and sign up for Kindness Prompts and explore other articles on their website www.PowerOfKind.org
Also, you can attend the Kindness Summit for 2025 on April 11th at the University of Utah or view online.
Who has shown you a kindness that deserves your thanks today?
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Curtis. Please introduce yourself.
Curtis: Hello, my name is Curtis Bennett. I am, I get to be the executive director to One Kind Act A Day, a National Campaign to promote kindness throughout the world.
Jacob: Tell me how do you go about trying to make a difference in the world?
Curtis: We all have a personal responsibility to make an impact in our world. Oftentimes people say, do you really believe you’re going to change the world? And my response is yes, I am going to be able to change the world. They may think that to be audacious or ambitious or overly ambitious or not realistic. But even if all I do is change the world of the people in my world, then that’s good enough.
Where kindness is concerned and where most objectives of goodness are concerned, it has a ripple effect much like an earthquake. It just ripples out. There’s an epicenter and everyone feels that at some point in time, they’ll feel it. And so while I might not be able to change the entire world today, if I was able to change her world or his world or their world today, I did my job. We all did our job.
Jacob: Give me some practical examples of how does [00:01:00] it actually work? What is it that your organization does for those who have never heard of it or haven’t experienced it?
Curtis: One Kind Act A Day is an organization that simply asks people to be more deliberate in their daily acts of kindness. What we’re trying to do is to simply state, let’s be more deliberate in our kindness on a day in day out basis. Let’s find those opportunities to brighten the day or to make someone feel better or to extend a kindness or even recognize the kindness that’s going on around us.
Research shows that while I get a much greater helper’s high by doing a kindness today. Research also shows that when I observe kindness is going on around me. I still get the helpers high. I may not get it to the degree that I would have had I been personally engaged, but as I see things going on around me It makes me feel good and it brings me joy and it gives me the physiological benefits of kindness in my life.
Jacob: On that front, what are the mechanisms by which you help individuals and [00:02:00] organizations be more deliberate with their kindness?
Curtis: If a person were to go to our website, thepowerofkind.org,and take our pledge of kindness, it connects them to our community of kindness. And how does it do that? So one, it gives them the opportunity to be able to receive twice a week a kindness quote. and a kindness prompt. And what’s really beautiful about this, of all the things that we do to engage with people, we probably get more positive feedback on this single element. What’s really interesting is, we have like a 0.005% unsubscribe rate on our kindness emails. Who unsubscribes from kindness, right? Hardly any one does.
The Other opportunities that they have is that they can go to our website and provide the tools necessary so that people can ask, what are some of the specific things that I can do to bring kindness more fully into my life and into my sphere of influence? For example, there’s one article that we’ve created that talks about the five things that we can do to be more positive on social media. There’s another article on what we can do to bring kindness into [00:03:00] our home. There are multiple articles on the value of kindness for the local business. How kindness can actually help a business with their bottom line. And yes kindness actually does have an impact on the bottom line and it shows that the kinder organizations have a 17 or 18 percent increase in profits.
Jacob: Shifting gears a little bit. What about this organization attracted you?
Curtis: It’s a great question. And again, one of the things that I think all of us should do is we ought to take an inventory and get a good look at the kindnesses that people have exhibited towards us over the years. We can look back at our mentors. We can look back at religious leaders. We can look back at family.
In addition, there are in all of our lives, statements that have been made. or small simple acts that seemed like nothing to the individual, but meant the world to us. And as we stop and take inventory, we realize, man, a lot of people have been very good to me over the years and I need to try and reciprocate in the best possible way.
So after 30 years of being in the luxury [00:04:00] jewelry business, I kind of got to the point where I said to myself, I could care less if I sell another Rolex watch ever again. And I really want to do something that’s substantial. Life has been good to me and it didn’t start off that way. I grew up in a dysfunctional home. My parents were divorced. I grew up on welfare. Statistics show I should still be on welfare, should be divorced right now, and should have a very difficult life. But had it not been for so many people who did so many good things, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing right now.
When Khosrow approached me, I was in the technology sector. I was the CEO of a technology company. I had done work in the non for profit space multiple times and really enjoyed it. But he came to me and he said, why don’t you come run this organization? I told him I’m not looking for a job. And he said I understand, but let me explain to you what we’re doing. And when I went home and explained it to my wife, she said, why are you even thinking about this? You gotta be kidding me.
You get to go be a 24, seven lobbyist for kindness every single day, you get to promote kindness where’er you go. Why wouldn’t that be something that you want to do? So we made the [00:05:00] decision to come and be a part of this with One Kind Act A Day and it’s been fantastic. That’s what I get to do. I’m a lobbyist for kindness.
Jacob: What have been some of the success stories that come to mind, places where you’ve seen kindness make a real difference?
Curtis: So the real beauty about this is that anybody engages kindness, we see success. Whether we’re talking about a school that sets a goal of 10, 290 acts of kindness in their 22-day initiative, but they kill it with 41, 000 acts of kindness. To a local business who says, no no, we’re a kind business already. And so I’m not sure that this is something that we really need to do. Only to find that after they did it, came to the realization that not only are there people more kinder than they realize. But there are a lot of things going on in their offices that they had no knowledge of. Not only the things that were going on within the office but what all of their people were doing in the community to promote kindness.
Going to the Utah Division of Juvenile [00:06:00] Justice Youth Services and going into a facility that was renowned for violence. that was going on there had a riot two weeks before we started. The department wanted to close down or pull the plug on our initiative, even before we began. We prevailed upon them saying if they started a riot, maybe they need this more than other kids. And so they allowed us and within 30 days, we had a 65 percent reduction of incidents. with the young men in this facility.
It’s a beautiful program where we teach kindness, get the kids engaged in kindness, and get them to recognize kindness. We hired a muralist to come in and teach these kids how to create a mural based on the things that they learned about kindness. And now it’s a permanent reminder in the facility.
And so after 60 days, they went to zero incidents. The staff is shaking their heads and they’re wondering how in the world! Now they’ve gone nearly six months without a single incident with these young men. So the transformative power is significant.
The last one I’ll mention is, we’re doing work with the Corrections Department. We [00:07:00] give out these kindness cards to people caught doing something kind. And one of the inmates said, My cellmate really helped me the other day. I was having a hard day, I was having a hard time, you know, with some things that happened with my family. I’d lost my job in the facility. I was really stressed out. And my cellmate, he helped me and he calmed me down and he helped me to realize that this is just one bad day and tomorrow is going to be a better day. And I gave him one of the kindness cards and said, thank you very much and he got real emotional, his cellmate was sitting next to him and he goes, No, I didn’t. I didn’t get emotional. And he said, no, yeah, you did. And he goes, yeah, you’re right. I did. And so he admitted to the fact that receiving this recognition caused him to be emotional and it created an atmosphere between these two guys that had never existed before while in a prison.
So we’re having monumental and just these beautiful impacts that happen on a day in/day out basis. There’s so many good things going on all over the place.
Jacob: How do you respond to those who might say kindness is just weakness, not everyone ascribes to that philosophy.
Curtis: There are the [00:08:00] naysayers, interestingly enough, and those naysayers probably don’t understand the real value of kindness as a hard skill versus a soft skill or an easy skill.
It’s a hard skill. It’s hard to be kind, and it’s hard to walk into a difficult situation. when somebody is assailing you with disrespect. To respond with kindness. It’s really challenging to do and we have to be deliberate in it.
Chester Elton, who’s a very renowned business leader and author says it’s not a should-have, it’s a must-have in business. Particularly where leaders are concerned when life around them is just seemingly falling apart and it’s easy to default to demands and mandates, then to take a pause, take a breath, and respond in kindness.
One of the great quotes out there, kindness will get done what nothing else in the world can accomplish. One of the things that people have a challenge with is defining the difference between nice and kind. A nice person isn’t always necessarily kind.
Let me give one example. I have an employee who’s not doing a good [00:09:00] job let’s say, and I’m in a meeting with them and they say, how am I doing? I say you’re doing great. I’m just being nice. The kinder thing would be for me to say, you know what? There are a couple of challenges that we’re dealing with that we have to grapple with and as your employer, it would best serve you and would best serve the organization if we take a minute or two and talk candidly about some of the things that we feel that you need to improve on. I want to help you. I want to encourage you. We’ll give you all the opportunities we can. If you feel like you’re having challenges, come to me and let me know. But yeah, there are a couple of things that we need to take care of.
How nice is it when all of a sudden that individual shows up and they’re being let go because I didn’t have the courage to be kind and all I wanted to be was nice? And then they’re blindsided because of my niceties that they’re losing their job. That’s not very kind. So there’s a big difference between nice and kind. And I think those people who are confused or think it’s no big deal are confusing nice with kind.
Jacob: What’s your vision for this organization? Where do you see it going?
Curtis: We have two primary objectives. One is global awareness, we want as [00:10:00] many people to be aware of One Kind Act A Day in the world as humanly possible. Not because we want something from them or we’re asking something from them, but we want people to be aware throughout the world that kindness does have a transformative impact. They can learn that from us by engaging and they can learn that from us by going to our website.
The other initiative that we have is we’re in the process right now with the Department of Corrections, with the juvenile systems, with schools, with businesses of creating templates, case studies, and research that people can access and use whenever they want to.
Right now, we’re working with a credit union up in the northwest and they’re using the case study to help them to better apply kindness into their sphere. If we can create all of this research and all of this data and all of these case studies and all of these templates, we’re convinced that hundreds of people and thousands of people are going to come to our website and we’ll never know they were there, but if they walked away with something that they could glean and use, we’re happy. And so our efforts are to create as much [00:11:00] information as we can possibly create so that people can use that information.
On our website, you can find PowerPoint presentations for schools, kindness assemblies. You can find information on businesses on how you can apply kindness within your business cities and communities. So the more we can create the more people can take from that and apply it into their personal realms.
Jacob: What can this community do to best help? What is it that you’re most looking for, beyond people visiting your site and taking the pledge?
Curtis: So one of the things that we really appreciate is when a business accepts the responsibility to amplify, advocate, and exemplify the narrative of kindness. We have a number of businesses that have allowed us to use their public platform to co-brand One Kind Act A Day with their business.
For example, if we’ve got a construction company who says on all of our construction sites, we’d be happy to put a banner up. So we co-design with them, we paid for it, and we created the banners and we placed all those banners on their construction sites. And when we get [00:12:00] positive feedback that says something about the business and it says something about the importance of the message.
Another home-run relationship comes when we can get cities and communities, even counties to get engaged with us. We have what we call our certified cities of kindness, where we get an entire city to engage in the whole process. We have some of the most inspiring stories of mayors and city councils engaging with their schools and other city organizations to promote kindness within their communities. We engage the youth, we engage the local businesses, and it’s not only inspiring, but it’s just a ton of fun.
There’s nothing more inspiring than to watch high school-aged kids go and take our yard signs like the one behind me and go knock on doors and say hey, our city is promoting kindness. Do you want a yard sign? There’s no obligation. There’s no charge. Would you like to help promote this kindness?
One group of kids in two hours, they placed 135 yard signs in their community. How incredible is that to know [00:13:00] that those kids had that kind of an impact? And it’s an experience that they’ve talked about and they’ll remember for a long, long time.
Those are home run hits for us, but I don’t want to ever, ever, ever, ever discount the home run hit of every single individual who engages with us on our community of kindness. I know that I’m dealing with the masses, but every single one has an impact. Every single one is important because who knows what’s going to happen when that one individual decides to pay for the groceries for the person behind them because they can see that they’re having a difficult time. What that’s going to mean to that family or to their kids?
Jacob: If someone were interested in learning more about this, Where would you point them?
Curtis: The powerofkind.org, go to our website. If you want to reach out to me directly, you can do that through the website, contact us. Those messages come directly to me. We follow up on every single request and we’d love to engage with. Anyone on any level, whether it’s just for them personally, for their family, for their [00:14:00] school, for their place of business, however they want to do it. But we’re, we’re happy to engage.
Jacob: you did a summit last year. Is that something you’re going to continue to do?
Curtis: Yes, the summit for 2025 is in full swing and going to be on April 11th at the University of Utah. For those who cannot attend, it will be live-streamed and on our YouTube channel. There were some really good things that came out of it last year.
Jacob: And when is your book coming out?
Curtis: That’s a good question. What’s really interesting is we’re in the process right now. of creating a One Kind Act A Day, gratitude journal. People who are more grateful and can find reasons to be grateful in their lives are kinder.
Jacob: Thank you, Curtis. Appreciate all that you do and who you are.
Curtis: Thank you. I feel the exact same about you so much.
Jacob: Thanks.
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