Our Origins

Kind Leaders is a kid founded and fueled organization that grew out of an 8 year-old’s passion to help those in need and her belief in the kindness cure. At the heart of the kindness cure is the idea that acts of kindness can have a powerful, healing effect on both the giver and the receiver. 

In third grade, while overcoming  health challenges, Rebecca formed an informal club among  friends who took a pledge to seek out ways to practice kindness every day and showed their commitment by wearing handmade bracelets she designed. She named it Kind Leaders as nod to the teachings of Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, two leaders which she greatly admired. After requests for bracelets started to pour in, Rebecca was inspired to invite her friends to join her family in doing service projects together and raise funds for charitable causes like Nativity Catholic Church's Operation Starfish, which was how she first learned of the starfish story that so deeply moved her. After raising a few hundred dollars  by selling homemade starfish soaps during a Lenten project, she decided to operate her soaps for a cause campaign year-round and teach others how to make soaps to raise funds. 

Motivated to do more, Rebecca asked her mom, a lawyer and Nonprofit Executive, to help her start an organization where she could teach other kids about the Kindness Cure and help them lead their own kindness projects. With mom’s help, Rebecca formally launched Kind Leaders as a nonprofit in 2024.