It was through Random Acts of Kindness Week (RAK Week) that I found MindHandHeart, and I am so grateful for the concepts of kindness and connectedness that intersected our paths. I’m Alexandra, a MindHandHeart Graduate Community Fellow, and Ph.D. Candidate. As a neuroscientist in mind, an engineer by hand, and an artist at heart, I’ve been so honored to be part of working alongside such a wonderful team, as we create the kind of coalition that connects many hearts to support creative innovations for the community betterment across MIT
But back to the story. It was during the first semester, of the first year, of my master’s program at MIT. I along with two other students Ishwarya and Dan had just finished meeting in Professor Roz Picard’s fantastic lab, perched between emotional valence pillows (aka emoji plushies) and a whimsical screen that grinned back when we smiled. You see, the three of us had started the MIT Community Challenge by designing a platform to promote kindness and prosocial behavior. We’d created it to address mental health and wellbeing concerns on MIT's campus. After our first iteration was launched and subsequently off to CHI we were circling back to examine other ways to support these efforts. We saw MIT, not only as our community but also as an incubator where innovations that could be supportive here, could expand beyond. As we wrapped yet another productive meeting, Professor Picard caught my ear before heading out saying “Have you heard of MIT’s RAK week?” Intimating that there could be synergy. She was right! Within the space of months, I was co-chairing the MindHandHeart Academic Climate working group (devising sustainable solutions to multi-departmental challenges), supporting the innovation fund, holding focus groups with students, and creating a new web interface for RAK Week’s 2nd ever launch. In short, I was collaborating full steam ahead with my amazing new MindHandHeart family.
Approaching RAK week now, years later, during an ongoing racial reckoning and amid the pandemic, many of us wonder, “what does kindness mean in the now.” To explore, time-travel with me to just a year before I arrived on campus.
Please meet the brilliant Bettina Arkhurst MIT ’18 one of the founders of RAK Week. In an interview with our fearless Communications and Community Engagement Manager Maisie O’Brien, Bettina explained that she sought to bring RAK Week to campus as she felt “If someone didn’t find a friend group or feel a sense of belonging in their classes, then their college experience could be isolating, and MIT is not a place to go through alone.” And so while MIT’s RAK Week was born in another context and time, the calling remains the same: inclusion, community, kindness. These areas are especially relevant as many of our colleagues, classmates, professors, and staff members remain sheltered at home, or away from campus and community.
This RAK week, we are called to recognize that we are not MIT because of where we are located, if anything, this past year has taught us that. There is a greater belonging that ties us together, the things we build with our hands to make a better world, the solutions we contribute with our minds, and the heart we have for our community and beyond. These are the themes of RAK week. For each of us, this RAK week may look a little different this year, especially as our ‘MIT community’ has grown to include family members, roommates, pets, and others in our living spaces who put up with the consistent buzz from our zoom lab meetings, advisor chats, virtual collaborations, classes and office hours. So this RAK week, we extend our kindness to the people around us physically, as well as those we miss. Further, we reflect inwards, to share self-kindness as we also reach out.
For those of us who have lost friends or family recently due to COVID (myself included) or like me, who are waiting for our community to recognize that unconscious bias, is bias, and see so clearly and painfully the immense structural work left to do (from equity to supporting mental health to inclusion) — kindness doesn’t seem like enough….and it isn’t. But then again, it also shouldn’t be. What kindness is, is an important place to start - a springboard towards a momentary uplift or maybe just a little excuse to check-in on someone you used to pass all the time in the infinite.
Back when Bettina helped launch the first RAK Week or even when I helped put on the second, we never could have anticipated one so virtual, nor its cause — but we all knew that a siloed MIT, could only benefit from connecting. While the silos are further apart these days, the sentiment remains the same. So wherever you are, on campus, or off, in the country, or somewhere else entirely, happy RAK Week, thank you for your kindness, and thank you for you.
“The best part of life is not just surviving, but thriving with passion and compassion and humor and style and generosity and kindness.” – Maya Angelou
