For the past years, covid pandemic has hit us. Making almost all of us isolated in our home. A lot has experienced stress, sadness, loneliness, and mental health disorders including anxiety and depression. How can people help the community at the same time improving mental wellness?

In this week’s episode, Justin Kruger joins us to share the goodness of helping people in need, homeless individuals, foster youth and seniors, and especially to people living with a mental health challenge.

Project Helping Founder and CEO Justin Kruger, helping others having a positive impact on the community that creates happiness within it. Their goal is to improve mental health by providing accessible experiences that foster meaning and connection. Making impactful organization to leverage the mental wellness benefits of volunteering both on you and your community. 

To find more of what they do, listen to this episode!
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Listen to the podcast here:

Improving Mental Wellness Through Helping the Community with Justin Kruger
 

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re about to try a little bit different of a format for this episode. Usually, I just come on and interview a guest and my guest today is Justin Kruger, who started the Kynd Kit program, which we’ll be talking about as well today, but I also brought on a couple other guests, Hallie Atencio and Phillip Hill, who are coordinating alongside myself an event next month to actually build some of these Kynd Kits to build a little community through this program. As you know, both mental health and community building are very important, very near and dear to my heart topic as where we are in culture today.

 
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Welcome to the program. How’s everybody tonight?

 

Justin: Good. Thank you for having us. 

 

Hallie: Yes, thank you so much. 

 

Phil: I’m doing great. Thanks for having us. 

 

Fantastic. Well, Justin, let’s start with you. First, I like to orient my audience here. Tell us a little bit about these Kynd Kits. What are Kynd Kits all about and what do people do when they do a Kynd Kit?

 

Justin: Sure. So, the Kynd Kits are a program of Project Helping, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we developed the kits about six years ago now, not in response to COVID but in response to the challenge of people are busy, how do we fit volunteerism into their lives, so we developed kits to really be a volunteer project in a box that has 100 percent of the materials you need in it to do something good for someone else. We now have almost 40 different projects that you can do in a box and so there’s a lot to choose from. One example that’s really popular right now is we have a kit where you make sight word flashcards and a reading game for first-grade students. So you open the kit and it has everything you need, you make about 75 flashcards. I have kids so I know what sight words are but for those of you that don’t, they’re words that first graders have to have memorized by sight before they move on from first grade. A lot of kids, if they don’t get to that point, they fall behind in their reading. So we partnered with local schools and we partnered with the Barbara Bush Foundation and we built this kit to have those sight words on them but also you make this little like paper bag monster reading game so when they get a word right, they feed it into the paper bag and that’s how they practice. So that’s one example of almost, like I said, 40 different projects.

 

So when I think about these projects, I oftentimes think about certain family activities, drawing turkeys at Thanksgiving or making Easter eggs at Easter. Is it a similar arts and crafts type of project?

 

Justin: Some of them are, some of them are definitely not. Because there’s so many projects, we want it to be a meaningful experience for the kit builder, that meaningful experience is what’s good for your mental wellb...