OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Students at the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy spent the day learning and sharing about the importance of kindness and understanding others.
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Discussions were led by Mindy Corporon, co-founder of a Kansas City-based nonprofit called SevenDays. It was created after her son and father were murdered in Overland Park during a 2014 mass shooting that took the lives of three people. It happened at the Jewish Community Center and at Village Shalom.
The mission is to promote kindness through education and dialogue.
“Having a conversation with someone and knowing that we don’t know them well and being able to ask questions out of curiosity and with good intention — I think that’s very helpful,” said Corporon.
Corporon spoke with students K-12. While conversations looked different for different age groups, the core message was the same: seek to understand others and spread kindness.
Love, discover, others, connect, you, go, onward: these are the pillars of SevenDays. Third grader Sadie Schlozman learned about how to spread it, how to receive it and how to foster more of it.
“She taught me about how I can use my actions in a good way,” Sadie said. “You can help people, you can pull people up if they need help to get up. You can help people with actions and teach other people, and those people can teach other people, and then our world can come together again.”
Corporon says the date for Friday’s event was set back in September before the Israeli-Hamas war. But the timing of the dialogue ended up coming at a critical moment in history.
Senior Emma Rosenthal hopes going forward, her words can be of support and love.
“Words and conversation have such a big impact on people, and sometimes people don’t realize how big of an impact it has,” said Rosenthal.
