Last year, two sophomores in Emily Mullen’s advisory class decided to bring back A Kind Act (AKA) club, whose purpose is to give back to the community. They previously gave flowers to social workers, gave cupcakes to cafeteria workers, put sticky notes up on lockers, and set up teacher appreciation week along with Mrs. Mullen and Mrs. Fitch, the co-sponsors.

“[They] had the idea after talking about social work in their child development class and how that process works and they learned about how large their caseloads are. Often they don’t have the resources or the time to do their job necessarily how they want to. The girls were talking to each other and decided that those were people in our community that they just wanted to show appreciation to and that’s where the idea came from. So they asked me last year if I would be their sponsor if they started a new club and we did a tiny bit of paperwork for the school to become an official club,” Mullen said.

AKA meets on the first Thursday of every month in Mrs. Mullen’s room after school to check in and schedule events for the rest of the year. When outside work needs to be done, members are notified on the AKA Google Classroom, which can be joined with the code Iy0g734.

“I’m really excited because last year the club didn’t start until after the beginning of the school year so we were kind of behind the curve promoting ourselves, and even though there weren’t that many people at our meeting, there was way more than were interested last year. The idea that it’s already growing and that people have ideas that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own otherwise is really exciting. I’m looking forward to figuring out if there are regular things that we can do now that we’re a little more established,” Mullen said.

This year AKA wants to do something for nursing homes, sanitation and hospital workers, and elementary school students. They want to walk animals from the animal shelter and give valentines to veterans. They are funded by concessions and occasional fundraisers.

“My personal goal is to support the students who are leading the club. I can see that they are developing their skills and growing in a leadership role, but also just in the idea that we belong to the same community so we should take care of each other,” Mullen said.

She plans to keep being their sponsor for as long as there are students who will keep AKA going and want to do even the smallest act of kindness. However, she believes that the club being student led is important and that it makes a bigger impact for other students to see other students leading positively.

“For me that’s really exciting to see them as a new generation of people that are already stepping into those roles that we really need. And also I think it’s just important for everybody to think about being kinder in general. If there is something that we can do for someone else that would cost us almost nothing except a little bit of time, then we should do that, especially for people who serve our communities like social workers, nurses, and teachers, people that we say we appreciate, but we often don’t show that we do,” Mullen said.