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Play, download and edit the free video From Heartache to Healing and Hope Episode 23 with Guest Jennifer Finkle.

The podcast From Heartache To Healing and Hope with host Bernadette Winters Bell, LMSW PLLC launches season two, Weathering The Storm; Cultivating Kindness on Monday, September 13 at 9 AM.

Season two of the podcast will highlight how guests practice and cultivate kindness as we collectively endure the second year of the pandemic.

The season two premiere episode, "Twenty Years of Kindness, Bees, Moose, and The Good Life in Delaware County" features special guest Jennifer Finkle, and her story of how twenty years of journal entries written by Andes Central School teachers came to be published, and subsequently inspired The Kindness Project, a partner program founded by Bright Hill Press and Literary Center executive director Beatrice Georgalidis, in collaboration with Finkle and Andes Central School.
In February 1999, Finkle, a teacher at Andes Central School (1990 - present) wrote on the first page of an empty journal: Kindness Chain Key:

“Remember you as a human being are very powerful and challenges teach us about the elasticity of the human spirit.” Use this journal to record a random act of kindness that you do for someone else. Pass the journal to the recipient and have them do the same. I hope you’ll be surprised to see how good random kindness can feel and hope it will continue within our school community.

The first of hundreds of entries by faculty and staff followed, filling two large journals by 2019. Finkle was inspired by an episode of the Oprah Show in which she spoke of random kindness and how it can be just as fulfilling to the giver as it is to the receiver.

The journals contain small, heartfelt and uplifting acts of random kindness, in written form. A retired administrator, John Bernhardt, who now helps with teacher evaluations, received the book and was so moved he recommended Finkle should get it published; “a lasting tribute to our unique school and all of the people who work so hard to make Andes Central School such a special place.”

Finkle partnered with Bright Hill Press to begin planning for the publication and circulation of The Andes Central School Faculty and Staff Kindness Journal, as well as the partner program “The Kindness Project.”

Beatrice Georgalidis, executive director at Bright Hill (pictured left) created and produced the project and promotional campaign, with her associate producer Sophie Bille.

Bertha Rogers, Bright Hill Editor-in Chief, edited the manuscript.
Five hundred copies of the Andes Central School Faculty and Staff Kindness Journal have been printed; one copy will be mailed to each of the 69 schools in the Delaware County and Otsego County BOCES school districts, including the gift of an empty journal, and a letter detailing the “The Kindness Project” with the hope that every school will begin their own kindness journal, and archive the kindness of their respective faculty and staff for years to come.

A video, email and social media campaign will launch to publicize the publication of the journal, and the Kindness is Contagious Project.

Jennifer L. Finkle was born in Southampton, NY, where her father was a NYS Conservation Officer and her mother worked at Southampton College. They moved to Andes, when her father transferred to the NYS Police when Jennifer was three years old. She attended Andes Central School from Kindergarten through graduation. She received an AD in nursery education from SUNY Cobleskill and went on to obtain both a BA and MA in elementary education from SUNY Oneonta. Her teaching career, since receiving her BA and MA has been spent at Andes Central School, where she is presently
in her 31st year of teaching kindergarten
and first grades in stand-alone and combined classes. She also directs the after-school/summer CROP Program.

Jennifer married her junior high-school sweetheart, Dwayne, and they have a beagle named Daisy. In their spare time they manage a small farm business. They have 30 colonies of bees for honey sales, laying hens for egg sales, shiitake mushrooms growing in the woods in the summer for farmer’s markets, turkeys for Thanksgiving and a huge garden. During the pandemic they finished an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven, complete with discarded slate roof tiles from Andes Central School, in which they make pre-baked pizza crusts for the markets. Jen’s Jam and Jelly business has also taken off, so many hours are spent picking fruit and making jam and jelly. Hunting, fishing, and foraging wild mushrooms are other favorite activities of the couple; they reap rewards by catching, harvesting, and processing their own foods for their own use and sharing with others.

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