A LITTLE HISTORY

The phrase "Practice Random Kindness and Acts of Senseless Beausty" was first penned by California writer Anne Herbert in 1982.

Almost a decade later, around the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 when people were feeling pessimistic and disconnected over the growing violence in the world, a woman noticed the phrase scrawled on a warehouse wall. She shared it with her husband, a teacher in the Bay Area, who posted it in his seventh-grade classroom. One of his students happened to be the daughter of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara, who then wrote about Anne Herbert and her phrase in her column in May of 1991. The article was then picked up by Readers Digest and later reprinted after the Los Angeles riots when it was noticed by the editors of Conari Press, a small press in Berkeley, Calif.

Inspired by the phrase and the people involved in the movement, the editors of Conari Press decided to publish a collection of stories recounting individual experiences. The book, aptly titled "Random Acts of Kindness," was published in February of 1993 and was embraced by hundreds of thousand of people who helped perpetuate the movement. Other books have followed, including "Kids Random Acts of Kindness," "More Random Acts of Kindness" and "The Practice of Kindness."

In February of 1995, the first National Random Acts of Kindness Week took place. Participants included more than 140 communities coast-to-coast -- from Boston to Los Angeles and Lubbock, Texas to Yukon, Oklahoma, as well as thousands of schools, city governments and nonprofit organizations.

By February of 1997, the celebration grew to about 450 communities, 11,000 schools and several foreign countries.