Children are the future, and this week’s guest is putting those words into action. Powered by the Boys and Girls Club, Scott Ehlers is Chief Kindness Officer of Kindness is Free, a nonprofit that encourages and deploys compassion, inclusivity, and respect among the next generation of youth. In today’s episode, Jenn and Kalli explore how youth advocacy is reshaping PR strategies and the tactics most effective in reaching young adults that are shaping the future.
imPRessions Season 3 Episode #2 Transcript
Kalli: Hi, Jenn.
Jenn: Hi, Kalli.
Kalli: So, Jenn, if you could do any type of PR, what would you do?
Jenn: Oh, wow. There are a lot of different avenues you could go down in terms of PR, which is something I’ve always loved about the industry. One component, one industry I would love to really dive into, is non-profit. Which I know can be really, really difficult at times due to a lack of budgets and just trying to bring awareness to what the nonprofit is doing. But I could tell that it would probably be very rewarding to really be able to be part of something, to bring awareness to a very important topic or group of people or community. So yeah, I would probably say non-profit.
Kalli: Yeah, that’s amazing. And I actually have done some non-profit work. So I can tell you from my experience, it’s extremely rewarding to dive into it even more so somebody that’s been in it and is really driving such an important conversation is our guest today. Scott Ehlers, who is the Chief Kindness Strategist with Kindness is Free. He’s going to join us today to tell us all about how the work that he’s doing, working with youth groups to make a difference in today’s world and to help kids learn about how to be kind, which is so important and just a really great cause.
Jenn: Well, with that title, he must be nice. So yes, let’s welcome him on.
Kalli: We’re very excited. So, let’s go. Today, we’re talking about something that’s shaking up the PR world- youth-led initiatives. Now more than ever, young voices are driving authentic, impactful campaigns and brands that truly listen are seeing the difference. Joining us is Scott Ehlers, a nonprofit leader who’s all about empowering the next generation. With over a decade at the Gary E Miller Family Foundation and a deep passion for youth development, Scott knows firsthand that giving young people a platform isn’t just a nice idea, it’s essential. As Chief Kindness Strategist with Kindness is free, he’s helping young leaders take charge in PR, making sure their voices are heard and their perspectives create real change. Today, we’re diving into how youth advocacy is reshaping PR strategies, the wins and challenges of youth-driven campaigns, and what brands can do to truly support and amplify young voices. If you’re passionate about the future of PR, social impact, or the next generation of changemakers, you’re in the right place. Scott, thank you so much for joining us today.
Scott: Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Jenn: So, what an interesting title that you have. Chief Kindness Strategist, I love that. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you got involved in Kindness is Free and your role and, and basically just tell our followers and audience more about what it is.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been doing nonprofit work for a long time now, almost 18 years. I obviously had done the aim of our family foundation work for a while, and then I got involved with the Boys and Girls Club about eight years ago, and I have had five of those at five of those years at the Boys and Girls Club of West San Gabriel Valley here in East Los Angeles. And I was working down here during the Covid lockdown. And during that time, as I’m sure many of us remember, it was there was a lot of negativity in the world. I mean, civil unrest, the Covid lockdowns, it was just a it was kind of a really kind of negative time. The Skylight Foundation, one of the leaders in the Skylight Foundation, her name is Lori Millard. She with our CEO, J.R. Zubac, here at the West San Gabriel Club. They would go on weekly walks, and they would talk about what was going on in the world. And in 2020, they were kind of noticing all of the lockdowns and everything, and Lori said she wanted to, you know, she wanted to do something to change the path that we were going as a community and as a country as a whole. J.R. agreed, and she said, you know we got to do something to teach kindness. Kindness is free. It’s easy. It’s like we can do something for our kids around kindness and joy. J.R. agreed, and, you know, the wheels started turning a little bit. And that is when the Kindness is Free program was brought to the West San Gabriel Valley, and it was a small program that we had a few kids, you know, kind of making sure we were saying please and thank you and teaching them, you know, the importance of being kind to yourself and to others. And it kind of took off from there. All of a sudden, the community got some buzz, and then Greater Los Angeles heard about it. And it really just started taking off. Kindness Is Free is a transformative initiative that aims to inspire and empower young people to be kind to themselves and to others in their community. Since 2020, now we’re, you know, 4 or 5 years down the road, we are now achieving this by hosting pop-up activations at schools or clubs or even businesses. We attend assemblies, and we kind of talk about the importance of kindness. We are now teaching kindness by facilitating our kindness is free curriculum. At these events, we have kids take our kindness is free pledge, which is just three things, and maybe at the end of this I can have you guys take it with us. You guys can be official kindness ambassadors. We have over 250,000 people who have taken the pledge, and we are now in over 450 boys and girls clubs across the country.
Kalli: That’s amazing and really inspiring, and I’m sure that there’s a lot more to it, you know. So, what are some of the key factors that contribute to the success of a youth-driven PR campaign?
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So, for us, it’s social media and stories. I think to grow this this effort, we have to kind of show our work. So I think on social media, we reach endless amounts of people. But I believe our stories are what really keep the needle moving forward for our program. You know, if we have tangible evidence that the program is working, people get excited because, you know, when you go to communities, or you go to kind of promote yourself or our program, you know, everyone inherently wants to be kind. So, it’s like, oh, yeah, kindness is free. That’s great. But when we can go to a school and say, hey, you know, because of our curriculum or because the whole student body took the Kindness Pledge and they have a kindness plaque in their school, they will see that the program works. So, if we have a story of like, “Hey, this school, because they took the Kindness Pledge and they’re running our curriculum, they’ve seen a drop in the amount of kids who report bullying report being bullied.” So, you know, you’ll see we’ve had stories of, you know, 60 to 60 to 70% of kids reporting being bullied, and after the curriculum and after the program has been at the school. It’s dropped down to maybe 30 or 40%.
Jenn: Well, that’s amazing, and unfortunately, it is a problem that many kids still face today. I mean, I think bullying has sort of always been an issue, but with social media it really amplifies it in today’s world. And I love just the message. You’re right. Kindness is free. I mean, it really is. Anybody can just take a moment to be a good neighbor, a good friend or a coworker, or anything like that. What I’d like to know a little bit more, just because, you know, you’re dealing with young leaders, how do you balance giving them creative freedom while also maintaining a strong strategic PR foundation?
Scott: Yeah. Great question. The way we give our young leaders in the program creative freedom is we really listen to them. We give them a platform. This is more so with our teens in our program. We give them the creative freedom to come up with enrichment programs or community enrichment programs where they can, you know, maybe they want to go out and clean up a park, or they want to do an art installation at, I don’t know, their local community center. Our kids have really been inspiring and it’s amazing the kind of effort and work they want to do. You know, recently we had the fires here in Los Angeles, and our club became a hub for some relief goods, like, you know, all the supplies that that families who are affected might need. And our teens really ran with it and began organizing kind of care packages for not only families who were affected but also the first responders. We were able to go to we’re pretty close to the Altadena fire, and we were able to take a group of kids out to the Altadena fire burn zone and hand out supplies to first responders. And that was all, you know, an idea by the kids. So, to do that, you know, to watch them do that is really incredible. And yeah, it’s amazing to see them because when the teens take hold of the program and there’s, you know, always a handful of kids who will do it and maybe some kids who don’t really grasp onto it, but the handful of teens that really do grab a grasp onto it, really run with it. And it’s really inspiring to see.
Jenn: It’s so nice to see compassion in young individuals because I don’t know, there’s something about that really speaks volumes to… kind we’re born with that trait, you know like hatred is kind of learned, so the fact that just, you know, young people in the community are seeing that, you know, their neighbors need help and first responders are out there putting their lives on the line. I think what you’re doing is great work and clearly leading a wonderful mission.
Scott: Yeah. Thank you.
Kalli: Can you dive into a little bit more of, you know, what are some innovative tactics or platforms that have been effective in helping to amplify youth voices and engage the right audience?
Scott: Yeah. So for us, we have a number of things that we do. But one thing I’d like to highlight would be our Monday Motivation Instagram post. So we have three main sites for Kindness is Free: one here in the West, San Gabriel Valley, or East Los Angeles, and one in Oxnard and one in Malibu. So they have been with us since the beginning, Malibu and Oxnard. And what we do is we have our kindness leaders or directors at those clubs submit kindness stories. So, they’ll find a kid in their program or their club as a whole who’s done something very kind, and they’ll submit those to us and we will post them on our Instagram where we highlight the kid. We kind of explain who the kid is and what they did, and then we actually use it. We call it Monday Motivation, but we use it as a challenge to challenge our followers to do something similar in terms of kindness that a young person did. So, that’s a really cool tactic that we do to get people engaged in kindness who might not be directly affiliated with us. Some of the platforms, I mean, it’s hard for me not to talk about the Rose Parade. We were so fortunate to be in the Rose Parade. This year was our second year being in it and we reached millions of people. It is a massive thing for us. We’re so grateful and fortunate to take part in that, to kind of leverage that. This year, we had a kindness is free Hall of Fame. The Tournament of Roses has the Wrigley Mansion, which is a space that you can rent out. It’s hard to rent as obviously as the parade gets closer, but we were able to get a time in November, and we highlighted leaders across Los Angeles County, whether that’s superintendents or teachers or people who are just doing kind things, and we inducted them into our very first Hall of Fame class. So, it was an incredible event, and it was just adults. So, you know, we expected it to just be kind of a, like a nice little luncheon where we recognize some people across different professions who are doing kind of things. But it turned into this really emotional event and emotional in a good way, where, you know, someone really opened up. And then next thing you know, everyone who spoke was in tears. And it was very moving and incredibly powerful to see how kindness this, this kindness program is now for recognizing people is now, you know, affecting change across all different, all different walks of life. That was a really great intro and a great kind of first step in kind of promoting our parades. So, we’re so excited about the impact that it had, and we’re looking forward to doing it again this year.
Jenn: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, adults, too, are impacted by it. And I think that’s really powerful. And again, it just shows the younger generations the importance of being kind and the importance of, you know, using tactics like PR to be able to sort of spread that message, which I think is really amazing, right? So, you know, we’re kind of talking very, very briefly just about social media. Obviously, we’ve all grown up in a different generation where social media, at least for me, was very, very, very new when I came into like high school and college. So, I have a little bit of a different perspective than Gen Z and even the younger kids from there. When you’re leading, you know, this campaign, how do you ensure that it stays authentic to young people’s experiences while still aligning with the broader message of kindness because they have very different experiences. Social media can be a really dark place, and from a very young age, they’re shown some of the dark things that we probably didn’t see as kids in the same way because it wasn’t accessible to us. So, how do you ensure that it does stay authentic to their experiences, knowing that they probably have seen their fair share of bullying a little bit more than some of the older people?
Scott: Right. Yeah, that’s a great question. So, there’s two things. The first thing is in our curriculum; the last section, there are three sections, but the last section of our curriculum, we have three sessions on kindness online and what that looks like. So we try to meet the youth where they are. And we recognize that, you know, kids of all ages are increasingly more online. And we’re trying our best to just help them and give them the tools to recognize what they’re seeing, or maybe what they’re experiencing online, whether that is in a comment section, whether that’s seeing, you know, horrible pictures or negative media. We really try to tackle and give them the tools to really help navigate that. So what does that mean? You know, we’re teaching kids to try to be aware of when they’re on social media or when they see maybe a negative comment or something that could classify as cyberbullying to what we call being an upstander. So, we want them to take action because they have the power to do it right. So if you know, to take, for example, like let’s just say YouTube comments, if there’s a YouTube comment that is you watch a video, and then someone is, you know, saying a really negative thing or a very hurtful thing, we want them to report it or delete it if they can. So that would be an example of being an upstander. We really want our youth especially, but even us adults, if you see something negative, you can click, you can flag it, you can report it. And then, you know, it can be the one report that gets that comment removed. And it could save from something terrible happening to the person who maybe posted the photo or whatever.
Jenn: Or somebody who’s vulnerable who stumbles upon it and doesn’t have, you know, the mental capacity to kind of process what they’re seeing or whatnot. So, it really does go a long way.
Scott: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we try to teach our kids that there’s a person behind every screen name, right? Every post, every screen name. There’s someone over there. It’s not just a, you know, a collection of letters that make a screen name. There’s someone there who’s reading that. So, we try to really let our show our kids the impact or, you know, try to help them realize the impact of a negative comment, or maybe cyberbullying and what it could have, what it could do to affect the other person on the other side of that screen. The second thing that we’re doing that we’re very excited about, we are this year, in April, we are going to be hosting a Kindness Youth Summit. So, currently, right now, we and the Kindness is Free department, and some other leaders across our Boys and Girls Club are being certified to become kindness-center leaders. And at this summit, we are going to hopefully train some kids to be Youth Kindness Center leaders, to give them the tools to really go into their schools, communities, wherever it may be, to kind of have the tools or just have the kind of knowledge of how to, you know, really affect change in that particular community or, or school. So, we’re very excited about that. And I think the way we’re going to do it is, you know, we’re going to make it a lot of fun for, for kids. So we want whether that means getting, you know, some influencers that kids follow these days, I don’t know, we’re still trying to hammer the details out, but I think, you know, that’s a way that we kind of meet kids where they are is we want to make sure that it’s fun for them. But we also have the secret sauce of kind of leading with kindness, and this kind of kindness center leaders training to kind of get them in the right headspace to go make a change in their communities.
Kalli: Now, that sounds exciting that you have so many things coming up and that you’re able to continue to grow, offer new things, and get people more involved. So, kind of taking the flip side of that, what are some of the biggest challenges that you face in running the youth-led PR initiative? And, you know, have you kind of overcome them?
Scott: For us in the beginning? For us, it was hard because, I mean, self-admittedly, it was kind of gimmicky, right? You say to people, oh well, kindness is free. We’re gonna come teach kindness and talk about the importance of kindness. We have a pledge. And it just felt gimmicky. But obviously, now with the kind of momentum we’ve had with schools and clubs across the country, even Boys and Girls Club of America, we’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to regional conferences. So now people recognize us. They, you know, the brand, the brand recognition is there. But locally, you know, there’s a lot of red tape at schools. So we can’t just go to a school and say, hey, we’re here, let’s do this. You know, we have to talk to the principal who has to talk to the superintendent and like, what are the, you know, what are the things that, you know, sometimes there’s permits that we have to get, and it’s hard, especially in schools. There’s also just different cultures and leaders, you know, who might not really buy into what we’re selling. But I think the beauty of our program really is it’s incredibly easy to facilitate, and all it takes is a good staff or a good leader who’s like, yeah, I’m into this, let’s do this, and it can change the color of the school in a, in a good way. That’s really the beauty of the program. It’s so easy. It’s not like we’re, you know, we’re asking schools to pay us or clubs to pay us. It really is. Kindness is free. We just want we just want the world to be a better place.
Jenn: And that’s great. And what I want to say is when you look at success from a traditional PR campaign, like a brand campaign- this is obviously very different. There’s a little bit more of a mission behind what you’re doing, but success is usually tracked by some type of ROI or some type of metric. What does success look like to you? Because I’m sure in the nonprofit world, especially when you’re really trying to get out a very strong, compelling message, it looks a little different. Is that true in your mind? Essentially, how would you track and measure the success of this campaign?
Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. For me, the success of the campaign is hearing the stories. I’ll go back to the stories a few times. The stories are, you know, what really for me, measure the success. If kids in schools are doing community enrichment programs, or all of a sudden the curriculum, you know, they’re out now, they’re outside of the curriculum, and bullying has come down, and we’re just seeing positive change in our youth population as a whole. I think we’re not going to see success overnight. I think this is something that’s going to take a while for these young youth leaders to you know, start growing up and being into more lead and professional roles. I think that’s when we’ll really see it. I think that this is the hard groundwork that we’re doing now for the future.
Jenn: And where do you see it going? You know, I know that you’re having the summit, and there’s a lot of really great initiatives that are in place, but it ideally in five years, ten years. Like where do you want to see this campaign go?
Scott: I like the Kindness Center leadership direction that we’re going there, I believe really hammering and teaching kindness and kind of getting kids to buy into that the kindest way is cool is the way to go. I think that is, for us, going to be what we’re really looking for. I think also for us, we’d like to be in a lot of schools. I think being in schools and just having kindness taught at schools. That was one of our visions when this program kind of first began and kind of what we’d like to do. The problem is, like I mentioned, we run into a lot of red tape with schools. So, just to get people to be more aware about the choices they make and kindness, I think we would see a shift in bullying and negative behavior at schools.
Kalli: Thank you for sharing all that. And I think that that’s such an important goal to have, obviously. So, what advice do you have to give brands or organizations that are looking to empower and connect with young people in their PR?
Scott: I mean, social media. Obviously, a lot of kids are on social media. I would say to organizations is to go beyond the walls. Think outside yourself. It’s one of our pillars here at the Boys and Girls Club is beyond the walls where we go out and we will go anywhere, right? We’re not just in our territory or our jurisdiction. We are all over Los Angeles, this one little club in East LA. So if there’s kids there, we’ll find something for them, whether that’s a sailing program in the Marina, which is, you know, 25 miles away from where I am right now, or if it is some sort of esports thing. You know, if there’s an opportunity to connect with kids, we’ll take some of our kids, and we’ll promote our club. That’s probably the big one. I would just say stay diligent. You got to go out there and meet them. I think you can go to social media and stuff, but if you’re not going out and hitting the road and meeting them where they are and honestly listening to what they are looking for, it’s going to be really hard. Here at the Boys and Girls Club, we really listen to our kids and their ideas, and I think that’s one of the main reasons our program has really flourished here we take feedback, and we listen to ideas that our kids have, and we give them the tools to do it. And I think it’s incredibly empowering to them to watch an idea they may have for a community enrichment project and to see it come to life and to see it to completion. I think that that’s the that’s the power.
Kalli: Oh, that’s amazing. And thank you so much for that advice. And thank you for joining us today and sharing your insights. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and stay connected. And if you have any questions or guest suggestions, don’t forget to send them our way at imPRessions@pollackgroup.com. We’d love to hear from you. Until next time.
