From the All Peacemakers Needed Video Series | Interview with Rachel Hunt, Founder of Tiny Kindness
What if the most powerful acts of kindness aren't the grand gestures but the small, quiet moments that someone does without even thinking twice? A bus driver who delivers you to your door in a snowstorm. A stranger on the subway who wordlessly takes a sticky banana peel out of your hand. A neighbor who shows up with homemade soup and bread on the hardest day of your week.
These are the stories that Rachel Hunt has been collecting and sharing since 2019 through her project Tiny Kindness — and they have reached hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
In a recent episode of the All Peacemakers Needed video series, host Nell Hill sat down with Rachel to talk about why kindness matters, how we can practice it more intentionally, and how acts of kindness and peacemaking are more connected than we might think.
Watch the full video interview below, then read on for the highlights.
What Is Tiny Kindness — and How Did It Start?
Rachel Hunt is a writer, poet, former librarian, philosophy professor, and mom someone who has, as she put it, "lived different lives." But the project she is perhaps best known for was born out of one of the hardest periods of her own life.
In 2019, Rachel had just made a cross-world move to China. Nine days after arriving, she received the news that her brother had passed away. A year later, on the anniversary of his burial, she was back in the country, jet-lagged and grieving and looking for a way to survive her own pain.
"I had an idea for a project involving sharing stories of small kindness as a way to consciously look for them," Rachel explained. "To remember that there actually are small, good things happening all the time to kind of counterbalance the big pieces we usually see in the news."
She put out a simple call: what is a small, significant kindness you've received? She defined tiny kindnesses as the type of act where the person who does it maybe never thinks about it again but the person who received it remembers forever.
The response was overwhelming. Since that first call, Rachel has shared over 5,000 of these stories. Today, her Tiny Kindness community has grown to more than 200,000 followers on Threads and over 60,000 on Instagram and people around the world continue to submit stories every day.
Why Small Acts of Kindness Matter More Than We Think
One of the most striking things Rachel has noticed across thousands of submissions is when the kindnesses tend to happen and what they have in common.
"A lot of them happen after the hard moments of life," she said. "A divorce, a miscarriage, a death, a sickness." And what makes them powerful isn't their size, it's that they make the person receiving them feel seen.
"It's not that someone gave them a lot of money, or helped them out of their really hard situation," Rachel explained. "But they saw them in that moment, and it helped them survive."
That's the heart of her definition of kindness: it doesn't require a lot of money, a lot of time, or even a lot of effort. What it requires is seeing the other person and treating them like a human being in that moment.
And even when we don't know the impact of what we've done, Rachel is convinced the ripples spread. "I'm confident of this, from the thousands of stories I've shared," she said. "They spread."
Key Insight:
A tiny kindness is the type of act where the giver may never think about it again — but the receiver remembers it forever. You don't need to know the impact to make one.
Three Stories That Show What Tiny Kindness Looks Like
Rachel shared several of her favorite stories from the project during the interview. Here are three that stayed with us:
1. The Birthday Cake
A woman going through her first birthday after a divorce had an 8-year-old son who remembered that his dad had always gotten his mom a cake. Knowing this year would be different, the boy looked up his best friend's mom's phone number in the school directory, called her, and asked if she would get a cake. She did. She delivered it. And the boy tried to pay her back with $2.47 every penny he had. A child's awareness, a stranger's follow-through, and $2.47 of pure love.
2. The Banana Peel
On a New York City subway, a mom was holding a sticky banana peel her 5-year-old had handed her with 40 minutes still left in the ride. A young man nearby noticed. Without saying a word, he walked over, took the peel from her hand, and threw it away at his stop. He never said anything. She never forgot it.
3. The Bread and the Deadline
Rachel shared a personal story: the day her first book was due to her publisher, a friend watched her two-year-old daughter the entire day so she could finish. When the friend returned that evening, she also brought a pot of homemade lentil curry and a fresh loaf of her homemade bread. Rachel hadn't eaten all day. She sat in her office eating chunks of bread straight from the loaf. When Rachel mentioned it to her friend years later, the friend barely remembered; she was just doing what she always did. But to Rachel, it was everything.
Practical Tips for Practicing Kindness
One of the most valuable parts of the conversation was Rachel's practical advice on how to actually become a kinder person especially when we're not sure what to do.
Her first tip: stop saying "let me know if there's anything I can do." While well-meaning, it puts the burden on the person who is already struggling. Instead:
Read stories of what helped others in similar situations
Ask people what helped them in hard times
Just do something even if it's small.
How Kindness and Peacemaking Are Connected
Nell asked Rachel the question at the heart of the All Peacemakers Needed mission: how does kindness help us be peacemakers?
Rachel's answer was thoughtful and layered. She sees kindness as connected to both outer peace — in our communities and neighborhoods — and inner peace, the kind that comes from feeling supported and not alone.
"The kindness that helps people feel seen actually does create a more peaceful community where people feel supported and can care for each other in those hard moments," she said.
She also spoke about something quietly powerful: sharing stories of kindness reminds us that we are not alone. Reading about someone else who cried in a bathroom during finals week, or on a train after a breakup, doesn't fix anything — but it helps. It makes the world feel a little less isolating, and a little more human.
"We are connected as humanity," Rachel said. "And that can make us want a more peaceful world — and even make it feel like it's possible."
As Nell put it: "There are thousands and millions of ways to show kindness. And there are probably thousands and millions of ways to add peace."
Watch the Full Interview
This post captures the highlights, but the full conversation between Nell and Rachel goes deeper — with more stories, more reflections on grief and community, and Rachel's thoughts on what it means to build a movement around small good things.
Watch the full video at the top of this page. And if it resonated with you, follow Rachel's work at @TinyKindnesses on Instagram, Threads, or Facebook.
Because All PEACEMAKERS ARE NEEDED. And all kindnesses count.
