KSHB 41 reporter Olivia Acree covers portions of Johnson County, Kansas. Share your story idea with Olivia.
As SevenDays enters its second decade of spreading love and kindness across Kansas City, it continues to honor the legacy of Dr. William Corporon, his grandson Reat Underwood, and Teresa LaManno, whose tragic murders outside Jewish facilities in Overland Park in 2014 shook the community.
In the wake of this tragedy, SevenDays was created to spread the message of love and understanding.
Aashrita Musti is a Blue Valley West High School senior who carried out this mission in her project “Safe Reflections.” Musti learned that to spread love to others, you must first love yourself. That realization won her a Kindness Action Scholarship.
“Safe Reflections kind of started with identifying this problem of body dysmorphia among youth. And obviously it is a very widespread problem currently, especially due to the prominence of social media in our lives," Musti shared. "I wanted to make social media a less scary place by creating my own social media account for Safe Reflections.”
For another part of her project, Musti had classmates write an insecurity on one side of a post-it and receive a compliment from someone else on the reverse. This simple exercise revealed that what someone may dislike about themselves, others might love.
“Oftentimes the one insecurity the person wrote on the front is often the insecurity that they complimented back, said Musti. “This really showed the person who wrote the insecurity that by hyper fixating on this one issue, they're overlooking so many other positive aspects that other people see in them.”
Heading off to college next year, Musti hopes to carry the lessons from Safe Reflections into her next phase of life.
“No matter where in life you're at, it's never too hard to give that kindness to other people,” said Musti.
