Secret do-gooders merit huge attention
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A friend told Laura Miller that, instead of a birthday card, she'd like Laura to do a random act of kindness in her name.
That was it. It was supposed to be a one-time thing.
Didn't work out that way.
Ms. Miller put a hydrangea flower on the windshield of a car she didn't know, along with a card that said, "For you. (Yes, you.) No. Really, you. The person reading this. Go ahead. Open this."
Her friend Vivian Lee Croft snapped a picture of the flower and card, and Ms. Miller posted it on a website created for the purpose, www.secretagentL.
Secret Agent L was born that day in July 2009, and a kindness avalanche began. She now has about 1,600 operatives, do-gooders all, perpetrating small acts of kindness from here to Mongolia. (No kidding. Mongolia.)
"I got a little carried away," said Ms. Miller, 32, an administrative assistant in Duquesne University's history department. "Oops."
Her "kindness movement" didn't get big right away. At the one-year anniversary this past July, she had 80 "affiliated agents" randomly dropping small gifts accompanied by business cards with the website's name.
That was nice, but the site only went viral when the much-maligned mainstream media noticed. CNN did a story in August after Ms. Miller revealed herself as Secret Agent L at a local fundraiser for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The day after the CNN piece, she had 1,000 e-mails from people who wanted to participate.
I met this tall, stylish woman at a charity event my wife and I attended on the North Side Monday night. Secret Agent L was one of the lures to help Community Human Services raise $3,300 in cash and gift cards for 500 homeless and/or mentally challenged adults and children. Secret Agent L was multi-tasking, posting messages to Twitter on her iPhone as she mingled.
You'd have to be a Scrooge or a hipster curmudgeon not to appreciate these guerrilla maneuvers against the chronic incivility of modern life.
In September, a Charlotte, N.C., woman e-mailed Secret Agent L to tell her how on a morning when she was frustrated by her job, her family and her finances, her life turned around at Starbucks.
First Published December 16, 2010 12:00 am
