A Conversation with Tom Tait, Author of Making Kindness Contagious

As mayor of Anaheim, California, Tom Tait did something unusual: he ran on one word, kindness, and then spent his terms trying to make it the culture of a city of more than 350,000 people. His book, Making Kindness Contagious: A Personal Journey That Transformed a City, tells the story of that experiment, from a campaign promise to one million acts of kindness by schoolchildren. He recently answered our questions about what kindness looks like when it has to survive budgets, politics, and crisis.

When you first said "making kindness contagious" out loud, what did people think you meant, and what did you mean?

When I first started using the word kindness, I wasn't yet saying "making kindness contagious." Even the word kindness felt different at the time. It wasn't a word I heard very often. In some ways, it almost felt old-fashioned, and it certainly wasn't a word you heard from someone running for office or as part of a political platform.

I knew people might confuse kindness with being nice, and I knew they were different, although at the time I probably couldn't have explained exactly why. I think people sensed the difference too. There was something deeper about kindness. It suggested a different way of thinking about a city and about our responsibility to one another.

What I meant was actually pretty simple: get outside of yourself and do something for someone else. Kindness is an action. It isn't just a feeling or an attitude. And I believed that if we could get more people doing that, looking around, seeing where they could help, and then actually doing something, everything would get better.

I was a little nervous talking about kindness in politics because it was so different from the language people were accustomed to hearing. But that was also part of its power. People understood instinctively that we were talking about something more than just being nice. We were talking about changing how we treated one another and, ultimately, changing the culture of a city.

How does a city actually measure kindness? What surprised you in the results?

There's a wonderful line in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "What is essential is invisible to the eye." I think kindness is a little like that. How do you measure kindness? How do you measure love? The most important things in life are very difficult, if not impossible, to measure.

So we really didn't try to measure kindness as a city. Today there's an understandable tendency to ask, "What's the data? What do the studies show?" But I always thought this was something more fundamental than that.

Imagine a city where everyone is just a little kinder than they would have been otherwise. What doesn't get better? Families get better. Neighborhoods get better. Schools get better. Workplaces get better. Government gets better. It's hard to think of anything that doesn't improve when people treat one another with a little more kindness.

There was one thing that was counted, though. The students in the Anaheim Elementary School District set a goal of performing one million acts of kindness, and they reached it. That was pretty remarkable.

We also began hearing about some very tangible changes. During that period, suspensions across the district were cut roughly in half, and we heard that reports of bullying had dropped dramatically. Those numbers were encouraging, but I never thought they captured the real impact. They were just things we happened to be able to count.

The more important effects were probably the ones we couldn't count: what happened to the child who performed an act of kindness, what happened to the child who received it, and what happened to the person who saw it and decided to do something kind themselves. That's where kindness becomes contagious, and I don't think there's a good way to put a number on that.

Was there a single moment, one resident, one block, one classroom, that told you this was working?

For the first couple of years, my strategy was really pretty simple: I just talked about kindness all the time. As mayor, I had the bully pulpit, and I believed that if the leader of an organization, or in this case, a city, shows that something is important to him or her, eventually it becomes important to other people. You encourage the people who get on board, you work with the people who don't, and you just keep at it.

I remember a gentleman saying to me that for the first couple of years, the kindness initiative was like ships sitting in port with their sails up. They were ready to go, but there wasn't much movement. Then the wind came, the sails filled, and off they went. That's exactly what it felt like. For the first couple of years, I kept talking about kindness and encouraging it, but it was difficult to know how much was really happening. Then things began to take off. People throughout the city started doing things on their own, and the initiative developed a momentum of its own.

The moment when I really saw that momentum was with the Million Acts of Kindness in the Anaheim Elementary School District. We had roughly 24,000 children, kindergarten through sixth grade, performing acts of kindness throughout the city. I remember the first assembly I went to and hearing the excitement from the kids. They weren't doing it because the mayor told them to. They were excited about doing something kind for someone else.

That's when I thought, this is really moving. Once the children embraced it, it wasn't a mayor's initiative anymore. It belonged to them, and ultimately, that was the whole idea.

What was the hardest part of keeping a kindness initiative alive in the messiness of real civic life?

As mayor, there was a lot coming at me all the time. I think that's probably true of any leadership position. Especially in a city like Anaheim, there is always something going on, and a lot of issues find their way to the mayor's office. It would have been very easy to fall into a completely reactive mode, just dealing with whatever problem was in front of me that day.

The kindness initiative was different. I had to be proactive about it. I had to constantly remind myself that this was purposeful, and that it was the main reason I had run for mayor in the first place.

I also knew there was a danger that kindness could become just another initiative that gets announced with a lot of enthusiasm and then gradually fizzles away. I didn't want that. I was trying to change the culture of a city, and culture doesn't change quickly. I knew it might take my entire four-year term, or, if I was fortunate enough to be reelected, all eight years.

But I also found that kindness helped me deal with the difficult issues that came into the mayor's office. When something particularly thorny came up, I would ask myself a simple question: "How would a kind city respond?" That question almost always brought clarity.

It was particularly helpful during the officer-involved shootings in Anaheim that brought the city into crisis mode. In deciding how to respond, I kept coming back to that same question: "How would a kind city respond?" The answer centered around listening, humanity, and recognizing the humanity of everyone involved. Kindness didn't make the difficult issues go away, but it gave me a way to approach them.

So although I had to be mindful and purposeful about keeping the kindness initiative alive, I found that kindness also helped me govern. The hardest part was simply keeping at it. It took perseverance and a certain amount of sticking-with-it-ness. Culture change takes a long time, but when it really takes hold, it will last. Knowing that, and remembering why I had run in the first place, kept me driving toward it.

Kindness in politics often gets dismissed as soft or naive. How did you make it tangible, measurable, and real to skeptics?

Yes, that was a common misconception, that kindness is somehow weak. In fact, I believe just the opposite. Kindness is strength.

Sometimes I would hear that kindness was fine for certain things, but that there were real issues, police work, for example, where kindness simply wasn't applicable. But that's based on a misunderstanding of what kindness means. Kindness doesn't mean letting people do whatever they want whenever they want, particularly when their actions harm others. Kindness also means holding people accountable.

Think about being a parent. A kind parent doesn't let a child run amok. A kind parent sets boundaries, lets the child know where they stand, holds them accountable, and helps them improve. Those things aren't contrary to kindness. They are part of kindness.

At its core, kindness is about getting out of the "what's in it for me?" mentality and moving toward "how can I help others?" If you can move the culture of a city in that direction, even a little bit, everything gets better.

That was something we had to explain and, at times, defend. But I found that when people stopped and really thought about it, they could see the reasoning behind it. Kindness isn't soft or naive. It asks something of us. And sometimes doing the kind thing is the harder thing to do.

You built this in a city with real problems, real budgets, real opposition. What did kindness cost, and what did it save?

There were certainly daily issues that had to be dealt with as mayor. I used to think of that as the blocking and tackling of the job. Those things don't go away. But if you can do all of that under an umbrella of kindness, where kindness becomes part of the culture, part of the ethos and the fabric of the city, then you begin to approach those everyday issues differently.

The idea was to get people thinking that being a little kinder to one another was part of our civic duty in Anaheim. And that doesn't cost anything. It simply asks people to be mindful of kindness and to think a little more about what they can do for someone else.

What does it save? That's much harder to measure. We saw improvements in a lot of areas. School bullying declined. Crime declined. Gang crime declined. And think about something like senior loneliness. If more people are looking out for their neighbors and thinking about others, that gets better too.

I would never claim that we did academic studies proving that kindness caused all of those improvements. We didn't. There was certainly a correlation, but the larger effects of kindness are probably immeasurable. How do you measure what happens when someone feels less alone, when a child feels safer at school, or when someone decides to help a neighbor?

And kindness is as important to the person giving it as it is to the person receiving it. That's part of what makes it so powerful. I think we know intuitively that things get better with kindness. Who wouldn't want to live in a city where everyone is just a little bit kinder? I think everyone would.

What should other cities steal from your playbook first?

Cities spend a lot of time focused on passing laws, politics, policy and strategy. All of those things are important, but I think the bigger opportunity is culture change.

If you want to work on something that can make almost everything better, work on the culture. And kindness is an incredibly powerful word around which to do that because kindness is an action word. To be kind, you have to get off the couch and do something for somebody else.

And there's something for everyone to do. Everyone is a leader in something, whether it's a city, a business, a school, a neighborhood, a family or simply a group of friends. Start by talking about kindness. Let people know it's important to you. That's the first step.

That's how it started in Anaheim. But it took dedication, and we had to keep working at it. It wasn't a quick fix. Culture change takes years. You have to be persistent. But it simply starts by talking about it, and then continuing to talk about it, encouraging it and recognizing it.

If you can get an entire city thinking that being a little kinder is part of their civic duty, something that's simply expected of us as members of the community, then you begin to change the culture. And once people understand that almost everything gets better when we're a little kinder to one another, I think real change is at hand.

So that's what I would tell other cities to steal first. Don't just think about changing laws. Think about changing the culture.

Looking back, is there something you'd do differently, or a kindness you wish you'd extended to yourself during all of it?

Looking back, I don't know that I would have done anything differently. I just wish I had spent even more time working on creating a culture of kindness.

That was the most enjoyable part of being mayor for me. The job could be hectic and stressful, but whenever I was in the kindness space, working on it, talking about it, recognizing it or participating in it, it was almost like jumping into a pool of cool water. It was refreshing.

I found that work incredibly rewarding. Being around acts of kindness, recognizing them and working on being kinder was probably about the best thing I could have done for myself during those years.

So in a way, I think I did extend a great kindness to myself. I just wish I had done even more of it.

Read more about Making Kindness Contagious: A Personal Journey That Transformed a City at librarytalespublishing.com.