Each year Weststates Property Management company presents a theme to its managers to encourage interaction between management staff and tenants. The managers then give presentations about how they carried out the theme for that year. The following story was submitted by Lynda Brady, one of the Weststate’s supervisors.

As a supervisor for Weststates Property Management over several rural towns, I spend a lot of time on the road listening to music.  We were issued our new challenge of "Random Acts of Kindness" for our annual training and so my brain was always thinking.  This is something we do with our residents and then present it at our next annual training.  The song "Chain of Love" came on and I played it over and over wondering if I could do something with that for my presentation.  The idea was born and we handed out a zip lock bag filled with the words to the song,  a description of our challenge,  several  strips of colored paper,  a glue stick,  a black marker,  a nutria-grain bar (for energy) to all residents and  the "chain of love" began.

My residents were to write on a strip of paper any act of kindness they did for neighbors, family, friends, etc. or that someone did to them in approximately a 6 week time frame.  They were told I would send them out a date to start making those strips into a paper chain like we all did in grade school. Little did I know how fun or big this would become.  We would go into apartments and see them already working on their chain. People would come into my office telling me what links were added and how big their chain was getting. Residents from ages 5 to 95 were going out of their way for other residents with just simple words of kindness, helping a neighbor with various tasks, baking them a goodie or cooking them a dinner.  I thought I knew which residents would do this and was so surprised that ones I never considered were doing it.  Some started putting the chain together as they wrote on the strips and this chain was taking up their apartment.  So they started bringing the chain to my office or the recreation room. Before long the chain was everywhere.

The day came to put this chain together.   Residents came out from their apartments carrying, dragging, and wearing their chains.  We had residents at various places on the property holding one end of their chain and the end of someone else’s chain.  Green Acre Park sits on a city block, and the chain went all around the entire center of this complex.  Cimarron Village had almost half of the entire property draped in chain.  We counted that 88 apartments did over 4,000 links for this chain. 

After this presentation at our training, I had several people call me asking about it and wanting their organization to do something like this.  Several months later, I see where new friendships have started, family relations reconnected, and the random acts of kindness are still happening. I think of this "random acts of kindness" as "random acts of success.” 

Merry Christmas to you and your family.

Lynda Brady, Manager, Cimarron Village & Green Acre Apts

Supervisor for Weststates Property Management