KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Youth volunteering through SevenDays did an act of kindness Monday by cleaning the entire space at Overland Park’s 9/11 Memorial.
Their service was part of a collaboration between SevenDays’ Kindness Youth Leadership Team and and Pay It Forward 9/11, a national organization that aims to restore the acts of kindness people showed after the 9/11 attacks.
“SevenDays is a local organization, also born of tragedy, and they also exist to make Kansas City kinder and more accepting,” said Ben Walker, a Pay it Forward 9/11 board member.
SevenDays was formed after an anti-Semite murdered three people in Overland Park in 2014. The killer's intent was to target members of the Jewish community.
Since then, the organization has worked to increase acts of kindness and love in the metro area.
Monday's act of service falls during what Pay it Forward 9/11 calls #11DaysofKindness, which encourages individuals, corporate groups and schools to unify from September 1-11. The program ends on the National Day of Remembrance, September 11.
Walker says it’s important to note good deeds don’t solely have to be done in this time frame.
“All the work that we’ve done here, all the outreach that we’ve done here, Kansas Citians just respond,” Walker said. “And so, we’re here because we really believe we’re making a difference in the community.”
The Overland Park 9/11 Memorial consists of multiple artifacts from the 9/11 site, including granite flooring tiles from the Twin Towers, a 14-foot-tall, 2.5 ton piece of steel beam that came out of the wreckage and a victims panel with nearly 3,000 names of people who died that day listed alphabetically.
There are four education panels that each tell the story of one of the airplane flights that went down on September 11 and a weeping wall fountain built by a local artist to emulate people with tears falling with white, powder-covered faces.
“I think it means a lot to come back to the site of a memorial that the community has put so much work into maintaining and just bring it back to life a little bit,” said Lasya Kambhampati, a recent college graduate that’s been volunteering with SevenDays since she was in high school.
Kambhampati was joined by her brother, Abhinav who joined the group after watching his sister serve for years.
“Seeing what one person could do to change a community, just small acts of kindness, what that can do, that just inspired me to be that change,” he said.
Monday’s service project made it so the memorial is clean just in time for the honor guard’s annual 9/11 performance there.
“It was very heartening today to have a group of young people come up and really want to volunteer their services to help out,” said Jason Rhodes, media manager for the Overland Park Fire Department.
“We take [September 11] as a great time to remember why we do the mission, why we serve as public servants and to rededicate ourselves to keeping their memory alive and making sure that this never happens again," Rhodes said.
It’s difficult to recognize something you don’t know.
That’s why the Kambhampati siblings want the future generation of youth who were born after 9/11 to learn from the past as often as possible.
“It’s important to one, recognize the history of what had happened, and also what you can do to ensure that when these types of things, these tragedies happen, that your community doesn’t fall apart and you come back together and have a strong community built on hope and ripples of kindness,” Lasya Kambhampati said.
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KSHB 41 reporter Rachel Henderson covers neighborhoods in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties. Share your story idea with Rachel.