Local kindness takes a bit of Patience

One of Richmond’s kindest individuals is getting national recognition in O, The Oprah Magazine. Patience Salgado is poised to not only make Richmond a kinder city, but now the rest of the nation. How did this remarkable story even happen?

September 15, 2011; 12:44 PM • by RVANews staff

Kindness is its own reward. We have all heard that expression uttered at various times in our lives. But while we’ve all heard the expression uttered, it seems that very few of us actually do the uttering. Patience Salgado is certainly one of those people who I can easily imagine, not only saying such a thing, but truly believing it.

Based on Patience’s experience, there is a corollary that we need to add to the whole “it’s own reward” business. Kindness is not just it’s own reward, but it seems to have rewarded Patience by having her featured in the October issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Nope. Not a shabby reward at all.

“It makes me happy to share this with Richmond,” says Patience in a telephone interview. “People are so genuinely happy and excited.”

Known by Richmonders simply as the Kindness Girl, Patience Salgado has made it her mission to imbue her namesake into the world, with the hope that it will multiply over and over. Her feature in O magazine can help give “the message of kindness…a new platform.”

She describes getting to this point as a “Twitter love story.” Local freelance writer, Joan Tupponce, was encouraged by Judi Crenshaw to write about Patience and her website. In February, Joan Tupponce phoned Patience and told her “a national magazine was interested in doing a story…” Tupponce refrained from mentioning exactly what magazine had said interest.

Patience tells me a resounding truth in the publishing world: “Nothing is a done deal until you get to the end.” With that in mind, Patience didn’t get her hopes up about seeing her story in print. Not even when she found out that there were three editors working on the article about her, or that a board was supervising the project. She seems to not have gotten her hopes up when a photo editor contacted her about using photos of Patience taken by local photographer Meghan McSweeney, or when a fact-checker called toward the end of the process. Only when she saw the her article in the October O issue did she realize that this “really long process” was all very real.

As a result of the article, she tells me that traffic to Kindness Girl has “more than doubled…probably quadrupled.” This means that even more people are going to learn about such things as her Guerilla Goodness idea, which are “intentional, anonymous acts of kindness performed in playful, creative ways for strangers, friends, and family.”

But one of the most rewarding aspects of having her story told in the pages of O magazine is that there are so many Richmond components. This makes Patience proud, as it does others. “My heart is really here,” she says. “People are so genuinely happy and excited.”

You can access Patience’s Twitter page here. And as it so happens, you can send her a little kindness of your own today—it’s her birthday!

September 15, 2011 12:44 PM 3