Acts of Random Kindness

Here’s some­thing really inspir­ing I got from the Irish​Times​.Com:

The Kind­ness of Strangers
Michael Free­man

Teenager Cameron Stew­art is on a mis­sion to make a mil­lion – and give it away – before his 20^th birthday

‘I WAS IN this café the other week,” says Cameron Stew­art, “and I was buy­ing an ice-cream. So I gave the guy at the desk a fiver and said, the next per­son who orders an ice cream, tell them it’s on the house. Tell them it’s free, and this will pay for it.”

Cameron Stew­art is an 18-year-old from Holy­wood, near Belfast, and this sort of thing is exactly his forte. He is the pro­pri­etor of Ark cloth­ing. The acronym stands for Acts of Ran­dom Kind­ness, and the idea is to encour­age wear­ers to per­form, as his web­site sug­gests, “One Ark every time the cloth­ing is worn.” It’s sort of like putting on a super­hero cos­tume, except your super­power might be the will­ing­ness to give up your seat on the bus.

The point, says Stew­art, is to change the way peo­ple behave. “In the world, every­one is just out for them­selves,” he says. “And to an extent that works.

But I think when you start to put your­self last, you realise that it is the best way to live.” So the clothes are really just a prod in the right direc­tion. “I want the logo and sym­bol to inspire peo­ple. Hope­fully peo­ple will see it and recog­nise it, and think ‘Oh yeah – I should really do some­thing for some­one’. That’s the idea.”

He shows me one of the Ark tops. Each one sold has a card­board tag, per­son­ally attached by Stew­art, with one sug­gested act of ran­dom kind­ness. They read a lit­tle like the cards in a Monop­oly game. This one says: “Pay for a ran­dom pump at the petrol sta­tion. This could be a costly one – but imag­ine if some­one did it for you.” As he shows it to me, he can’t resist a lit­tle salesman’s pitch. “You can see, can’t you,” he says, “they’re class qual­ity.” It does look like a nice shirt.

So did the clothes come first, or the con­cept? Was the idea always to change the world? “No,” he says. “No, no, no. It was orig­i­nally going to be just for Cameron’s profit. And for me to be a mil­lion­aire by the time I was 20.

But then I realised that it’s more fun to give money away than to store it all up. So it changed to being a mil­lion­aire by the time I was 20, and giv­ing it all away.” All the prof­its from Ark clothes go to char­i­ta­ble works – basi­cally, acts of kind­ness on a larger scale. “When the whole busi­ness was build­ing up, I made a group on Face­book,” Stew­art says. “There are about 500 or 600 mem­bers now. And just before Christ­mas I sent out a mes­sage say­ing, if you see a need any­where, just e-mail me and we’ll pay for it.”

So what have they done so far? “One girl e-mailed and said: ‘There’s a woman I work with who’s recently had a child. And she was back to work within a week of hav­ing the baby, because she doesn’t have any money and she’s really, really strug­gling.’ So I gave her some money, and they made up a Christ­mas ham­per and deliv­ered it. We did a few ham­pers.” The group also deliv­ered presents to a Belfast home­less shelter.

How did he get started in the clothes busi­ness so young? “Well, when I was in school, I was an entre­pre­neur at heart,” he says. “I could sell any­thing, and I always tried to sell any­thing. Just for the fun of it, I guess. And I started buy­ing designer cloth­ing online, and sell­ing it online. And then from doing that, all these Chi­nese sup­pli­ers e-mailed me, so I ended up get­ting this mas­sive list of fac­to­ries in China. All these contacts.”

When he came up with the idea for Ark – and after his exams were over — he went to China him­self to check he wasn’t buy­ing from a sweat­shop. “Thank­fully, the first guy I met was just fan­tas­tic, and the fac­tory was great. We drew up a con­tract and got 600 shirts ordered. It took a week.”

This is all highly cred­itable. But, I ask, doesn’t he miss nor­mal 18-year-old activ­i­ties? “I do miss Xbox and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “I would love to sit and do that all day. But I think this’ll be far more reward­ing, even though it means answer­ing e-mails all day.”

Cameron is scep­ti­cal about the idea of going to col­lege. “The busi­ness­men I aspire to be like don’t have degrees. They just started off. A lot of my friends have gone, but most of them are still based in Belfast, so I’m still kind of liv­ing that life. Apart from busi­ness meet­ings, and bank man­ager stuff, and all that.”