Born This Way/Cotton On Foundation

The STORY

Born This Way Foundation and Cotton On Foundation backed us, through the Kindness in Community Fund, to try something simple: let young people define kindness for themselves, then share it with their peers.

So we did. 43 members of our National Youth Collective, aged 12 to 20 and from across Australia, chose the topics, wrote the briefs and starred in every video. The result was a campaign that spoke like young people instead of at them, and a set of classroom resources that schools are still using.

The challenge: where we started

Hate and bullying are loud online. Kindness usually gets a poster and a slogan.

We wanted to find out what happens when young people take kindness seriously, in all its complexity, and make the case themselves. The campaign had to work in two places at once. It had to win attention on Instagram and TikTok within a few months, and it had to stay useful in classrooms long after the campaign ended.

It also had to avoid the usual trap: adults telling young people what kindness means.

The solution: our approach

We ran it the way we run all our partner work. Young people lead, experts guide, and everything is built to last.

1. Young people set the agenda. In more than 25 hours of small-group conversations, Collective members met in groups of 7 to 10 to work out what kindness means, then filmed the videos and gave feedback on every edit. Their discussions got more nuanced over time, and the content followed.
2. Expert guidance in the room. Child psychologist Jocelyn Brewer advised on language and messaging for mental wellbeing and peer support. A registered psychologist helped shape the printed resources.
3. Kindness, with the complexity left in. Episodes take on kindness versus niceness, performative kindness, kindness that is weaponised, kindness to yourself, and what kindness looks like across cultures, including a Tamil perspective.
4. Built for social and for school. The series launched on Instagram and TikTok on 2 April 2025 with two to three videos a week and paid promotion behind ten of them. It then moved onto PR PLUS for teachers.
5. Young people asked for hard copies, so we made them. Collective members told us they wanted printed resources as well as video. We added an A2 "30 Days of Kindness" poster, postcards, a feelings booklet, a poster series, bingo cards and a student wellbeing menu.

The difference it made: our impact

The campaign reached young people online, then kept working in schools.

• Reach. The videos earned 440,000 views and more than 7,300 hours of watch time in the first two months. They now sit at 800K+ views across Instagram and TikTok.
• Leadership. 43 young people built the campaign from the ground up, and grew their own understanding of wellbeing, empathy and kindness while working with a psychologist.
• Classrooms. Within a month of landing on PR PLUS, 42 schools had downloaded the resources and used the videos in class. Downloads now run into the thousands.
• Whole-school use. The Inclusion Captains at a Melbourne school built their Wear It Purple Day around the campaign. Posters and postcards went up across the school, the feelings booklet went into classrooms, and the videos played on a loop on screens all day.
• Teachers noticed. Teachers told us they value resources that are positive, preventative and strengths-based. Several said students from many backgrounds saw themselves in the videos on culture and kindness, which they rarely get.
• Beyond the classroom. The videos are now part of our parenting webinar series, and we ran a workshop with the Cotton On team through the Cotton On Foundation.
• Still in demand. In August 2026, more than a year after launch, a group of students in Western Australia asked us for printed copies of the handbook, posters and wellbeing menu cards for their own project.

The videos and printables remain available to schools on PR PLUS, so the Foundations' investment keeps working for years.

Key numbers and voices