Community Smiles

“Those smile pictures are beautiful. I would definitely love to put one in my window.”

It’s amazing what can happen when a community comes together. Recently, students from Horsham Primary School, Rasmussen Campus, completed ‘Your Smile Can Change The World’ colouring-ins for World Smile Day on 2 October. These weren’t just colouring-ins to be taken home and put on the fridge. The students’ beautiful creations were shared with local businesses and placed in shop windows across Horsham and they looked amazing.

You could sense the pride in the students’ work, and that pride was also reflected in the businesses that chose to showcase their creations. There was something really special about seeing the work of local children displayed proudly in our community. But perhaps the most important part was what happened next. Every person who walked past one of those windows had the opportunity to receive a little moment of joy. A child’s creativity became a business’s way of connecting with the community, and the business became a place where someone could stop, smile and perhaps have their day changed by something they hadn’t expected to see.

We often think we need to do something big to make a difference in the world, but what if we don’t.  What if making a difference can be as simple as a student picking up some pencils and colouring a smile. What if it’s a business owner saying, “Yes, I’d love to put that in my window”.  What if it’s the person walking past who stops, looks at the picture and smiles. And what if that smile is then passed on to someone else. That’s a ripple. One small action creating another, and another, and another.

We don’t always get to see where our small acts of kindness end up. We may never know who needed that smile, that conversation, that welcome or that moment of connection, but we can still choose to create them. The students may have thought they were simply completing a colouring-in, and the businesses may have thought they were simply putting something in their windows, yet together, they created something much bigger.  They created a community filled with colourful reminders that we can all contribute to making someone’s day a little brighter.

So next time you wonder whether one small thing can really make a difference, remember those smiles in the shop windows. Perhaps changing the world doesn’t always start with something enormous. Perhaps sometimes, it starts with a child, a colouring-in, a business willing to share it, and someone walking past who simply… smiles.