From the moment they hit the ‘screen’ – #iCANHELP has been changing lives in a positive direction online and off.
They recently announced their latest form of kindness going viral! Don’t miss the 2-minute video at the end, and share it forward. We all can make a difference!
#ICANHELP Bristow Compliments
Bristow Middle School works to improve school culture through a compliments page.
Alexa Negrete and Allison Kim were tired of seeing negativity on their campus. In response, they created Bristow Compliments, an Instagram page where they could anonymously post compliments about students at their campus. They are being featured this week on YouTube as part of ICANHELP’S #digital4good campaign.
“If you send us a picture of yourself, we’ll compliment you,” said Alexa. “But then people started saying, ‘Oh, I want to nominate this person or this person.’ Let’s make this a thing, so now we have compliment for a friend Friday.” Any time during the week people can send in pictures of their friends and a message to go with the photo. On Friday, “We post the picture of the friend along with the message and a compliment them from from us.”
Both Alexa and Allison wanted to stay anonymous. “We’ve been accused of doing it for popularity on several occasions, so we just didn’t want to mislead people into thinking that way,” said Allison.
The page set out to compliment everyone and did not focus on one peer group or one set of students. Alexa and Allyson focused on the little things about each person that made him or her special so that compliments came across as genuine and not generic.
“If we notice people haven’t been complimented in a while,” says Allison, “We will go on a compliment spree and just randomly compliment our followers. It’s crazy how much work it takes to make this for this little video that they play for 15 seconds and they scroll past it that we really put a lot of effort into this account”
“Next year, since we won’t be here, we want the account to keep going,” said Alexa. “It’s made such an impact right now that we are hoping that will continue into the future. So we’ve chosen two 7th graders to give the account to and post updates.” “We’re really excited,” said Allison.
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About: #ICANHELP is a Bay Area-based national nonprofit organization that creates and promotes positive, school-based solutions & interventions to online harassment and bullying. We are a project of the Net Safety Collaborative.
Bristow Middle School is located in Brentwood, CA and is part of the Brentwood Union School District.
