Admittedly, it’s hard to write much about the Random Acts of Kindness Club (RAKC) because it’s difficult to state their purpose in words once someone has seen their name. As you might expect, members of RAKC are some of the nicest people you’ll see on campus, but being nice isn’t entirely what they’re about. You might also think that their purpose for existing is to provide a gathering space for kindness-minded people, but that’s not really it either. Rather, they seem to be about providing an outlet for kindness-minded people to use their creativity to better students’ and staff’s lives in unexpected, one might even say random, ways.
I should start the information section by explaining what the use is of scheduled meetings for a club that’s specifically called Random Acts of Kindness. I would argue that the name gives the wrong impression to non-members, as evidenced in the introduction paragraph. It’s not really about the acts of kindness being spontaneous, split-second decisions to help someone, but rather it’s about doing acts of kindness that the recipients didn’t expect or know about in advance. Put another way, the acts aren’t random to the person doing them, only to the person receiving them. This confused me too at first, as one would expect the club’s name to describe what its members get, but it’s actually describing what non-members get from members.
As for my experience at my first meeting of RAKC, it was quite productive. As usual for the first few meetings of a semester, the exec team had a slideshow presenting a bit about themselves, and then there was an icebreaker. For the main portion of the meeting, everyone split into groups of five to six people to brainstorm about events that we could hold for the public. There were a lot of ideas, many coming from a single person in the back of the room (there were like 40+ people)! Some ideas involved having activities for families to do during Family Weekend, and a classic hand turkey event for Thanksgiving-time, but there were more popular ones that fit better with the club theme, such as giving out free small bags of candy/snacks to passerby1.
Overall, I’d say RAKC is a worthwhile club to join, one which will impact many people’s days for the better. At the meeting I was pretty excited to see all the amazing ideas that people came up with, and I’m confident that W&M will continue to see many more amazing acts of kindness from this club in the future.
1. This actually ended up happening! I wasn’t in the meeting where they decided to go with this idea, but I happened to walk by Sadler on October 1st and they were tabling with the candy bags! I ended up quickly donating $10 and running to my Amtrak train. ↩