Fort Kindness

Fort Kindness



Bob is a Master Carpenter and General Contractor who does a
lot of work in the inner city of Milwaukee, WI.
He and I were talking yesterday about how far a little kindness can go
and he told me this story.

He was working on a
job site recently that had a particularly severe problem with stolen materials. After a couple of days of this he noticed
that the missing items were being taken to a vacant lot across the alley where
they were being used to build a ramshackle fort by the kids in the neighborhood.
His crew kept dragging the lumber back and the next day they would arrive to
find even more missing. The crew kept urging Bob to call the police; but Bob
had other ideas.

The next day Bob went and bought the needed supplies and
enlisted two of his employees to build the fort -complete with a door, windows
and a shingled roof! He tells me that when the neighborhood kids got home from
school that day “You could have been 50 miles away and you still would have
heard them hootin’ and hollerin’”.

Not only did Bob never have another thing missing from their
project, every morning they would arrive to find that the site had been
meticulously cleaned. Every wood chip, every bent nail, every soda can. They
also found a thank you card signed by
40+ kids. (He keeps it on his mantel).

Bob’s act of kindness may not seem to have had a significant
impact from our “adult” point of view-but I’ll bet those kids would disagree!