Augusta (left) and Glebs (right) will be giving away kindness bingo cards in Library square

To celebrate World Kindness Day, the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness is organising a kindness bingo on campus.

Celebrated every year on 13 November, World Kindness Day raises awareness on the importance of kindness and encourages people to make the world a better place by being kind.

Augusta Sibayan and Glebs Ovcinnikovs, two placement students at the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness, are organising a game of bingo to spread kindness around campus.

The event is based on a bingo card designed by last year’s placement students Freya Smith and Ray Teso Buitrago, but altered slightly to mirror a study done by Cotney & Banerjee (2019) where participants defined kindness as acts of emotional and practical support, inclusiveness, generosity and positive sociality among other things. Each bingo card includes kind activities that fall under those categories.

Students and staff are invited to play Kindness Bingo and complete as many kind actions listed on their cards as possible. Augusta and Glebs will be handing over the bingo cards in Library Square between 12-2pm from Monday 11 to Wednesday 13 November.

The participants will have the whole week to complete their bingo cards. On Friday 15 November, 12-2pm, Augusta and Glebs will be back at their gazebo in Library Square where participants will be able to redeem their bingo cards and get rewarded with a handwritten card filled with kind words, and a Celebrations chocolate.

Augusta and Glebs said: “Our bingo event is meant to commemorate World Kindness Day, which is celebrated annually to spread awareness around kindness and its impact for both the receiver and the giver. We hope that people will feel similar results of happiness, wellbeing and belonging as reported by the participants in the study that inspired the event.”