Overview

Radical Kindness is a youth-driven organization dedicated to teaching young people (13-29) how to respond and address trauma - direct or indirect - and their mental health with kindness. Radical Kindness started from an informal online support group involving primarily those who are BIPOC, women, non-binary, and queer. Our group came together because trauma was greatly impacting our personal, social, and professional lives. We recognized our experiences with trauma and a collective desire to heal from our own personal and collective traumas. Our experiences with trauma are very much informed by our identities and intersectionalities (i.e. BIPOC, women & non-binary, LGBTQ2S+) and we bring that to our work and the groups we work with. Our mission is to ensure that marginalized and underserved youth and young adults (i.e. BIPOC, women, non-binary, LGBTQ2S+) are able to learn how to process and heal their own trauma, while developing the skills to practice and teach radical kindness (i.e. how to teach others who are living with and/or who have survived trauma kindly). We run workshops with youth (13-29) within and/or from marginalized and underserved communities that bring to the forefront issues of trauma and healing, and preventing trauma from occurring (anti-bullying, queer and trans inclusion, kindness while dating, etc.). These workshops will be the start of a conversation about how mental health connects to their social and constructed identities, and the workshops will be supported by family, youth, and community organizations serving specific and/or protected groups. The goal is to help youth understand the broader context in which trauma occurs. At the core of these workshops is an imperative to bring awareness to, and start the conversation of issues related to trauma and how we treat each other as human beings within our communities; to teach youth how to be radically kind to others, and the benefits of radical kindness.