The Mayor Who Tried to Run a City on Kindness

Most political campaigns begin with a poll. Tom Tait's began with a little girl he never met.

Her name was Natasha Jaievsky, and she was six years old when she was killed in a car accident. Afterward, her father found her drawings and writings, and they were full of a child's simple wish for a kinder world. To honor her, he began putting up homemade signs around Anaheim, California, carrying a message inspired by his daughter: "Make Kindness Contagious."

Tait kept seeing those signs. He was a lawyer and businessman who had served on the city council years earlier, and by his own account he had been a painfully shy child, the kind of kid who dreaded speaking in front of a class. He tracked down Natasha's father, heard the story behind the signs, and could not stop thinking about it. What if a city could heal itself from the inside, one act of kindness at a time? In 2010 he ran for mayor of Anaheim with "Make Kindness Contagious" as his platform. He won, and served until 2018.

Making Kindness Contagious: A Personal Journey That Transformed a City, arriving December 1, is his account of what happened next, and it carries a foreword by the Dalai Lama.

It's worth pausing on how unusual Tait's idea was. Kindness is almost always treated as a private virtue, something between neighbors, friends, or strangers holding a door. Tait treated it as public policy. Anaheim is best known to the world as the home of Disneyland, but it is also a large, diverse city with the same pressures as any other: tight budgets, divided neighborhoods, and residents who don't always trust city hall. Tait argued that the way people treat one another wasn't a soft side issue. It was the thing that made everything else work, or fail. Under his leadership Anaheim adopted the name "The City of Kindness," and he looked for ways to build that value into how the city operated, from community programs to the way it approached hard problems like homelessness and policing.

Some of the most striking results came from children. Anaheim's elementary school students were challenged to complete a million acts of kindness, and they went past the goal. The movement drew attention far beyond Southern California. In 2015 the Dalai Lama celebrated his eightieth birthday in Anaheim, and Tait, the boy who once feared speaking in class, found himself standing beside him in front of a crowd of thousands. In 2016, at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Tait joined Lady Gaga and the Dalai Lama in presenting a resolution calling for 100 billion acts of kindness. His work grew into City of Kindness, an organization that helps other communities follow the same path. A father's handmade signs had become a movement.

That is what makes this book more interesting than a typical leadership memoir. Tait isn't writing about kindness from a distance. He's writing from inside a city, with all the friction that comes with it. His years in office included real conflict, from tense debates with powerful interests to moments when the community felt broken and in need of healing. That is exactly where his philosophy was tested. It's easy to believe in kindness when things are going well. The harder and more useful question is whether it still matters when people are angry, frightened, or divided, and Tait lived that question in public.

There's a practical lesson here for readers who will never run for office. Tait's central idea is right there in the slogan: kindness spreads. One act changes how the next person behaves, and a culture is really just the sum of millions of small choices. That means anyone can start: a teacher setting the tone in a classroom, a manager deciding how meetings will feel, a neighbor organizing a block. The book is, in part, a guide to thinking that way, and to understanding why something so simple is so rarely practiced on purpose.

It is also a deeply personal story. The subtitle calls it a personal journey, and that matters. Tait writes about the shy boy he was, the unlikely path that led him back into politics, and how one little girl's message changed him along with the city he served. Natasha never knew what her words would set in motion. This book is, in a real sense, her legacy.

Making Kindness Contagious is for anyone interested in leadership, public service, education, or community life, and for anyone who has ever wondered whether one good idea, practiced consistently, can really change a place. Tait's answer, drawn from eight years of trying, is that it can.

Making Kindness Contagious: A Personal Journey That Transformed a City by Tom Tait arrives December 1, 2026. Pre-order your copy now.