Creating a Culture of Kindness: Partnership Gives Renewed Life to former ‘Cheetos Club’

While a funeral inherently signifies an end, it was one such tragic event that actually sparked the start of something big in Petoskey. 

Spencer, a student at Petoskey High School, was killed on his 17th birthday in a car accident. At his funeral, many peers stood to share stories about Spencer with a common thread: his ever-present kindness.

“This was a kid who just made it his life plan to be kind,” said Lance Bailey, a former teacher at Petoskey High School. “Kid after kid, situation after situation – it was literally mind blowing. The funeral literally changed my life.”

Among the many stories shared at Spencer’s funeral was one from a peer who shared that Spencer came across him while he was sad in the hallway. Spencer pulled a bag of cheetos out of his backpack and said “No one can be sad when they are eating a bag of cheetos.” It were these small, kind gestures that left an impression on many.

“As a teacher, (this death) is a difficult thing … it just hit hard,” Lance said, “and then, dealing with how you are going to deal with it in the class …”

The students decided to cover Spencer’s desk in cheetos and paper airplanes (Spencer had showcased a love of paper airplanes during a recent physics lesson about flight) for the rest of the school year. But, at the end of the 2014-15 school year, Lance couldn’t bring himself to throw away the Cheetos. Instead, he hung a few bags from the ceiling, where they stayed all summer.

The beginning of the following year, students in his new class asked: what’s with the cheetos? And so, Spencer’s story and legacy lived on. Spencer even influenced Lance’s words at that year’s graduation ceremony, where he spoke on how to “plan to be kind.” 

In the 2018-19 school year, 15-20 students began meeting every Friday after school to brainstorm ideas about how to implement kindness within Petoskey High School, and the Cheetos Club has continued to grow ever since. Spencer’s kindness even spread to faraway places, with Cheetos clubs starting in Japan, Iowa and Ohio.

“We spent 6 years on that journey of kindness – which changed so many kids’ lives, changed our school – and changed my life,” Lance said. “When I went to retire, kids were not worried about me, they were worried about Cheetos Club.”

Northmen Den Youth Services is excited to announce that the Cheetos Club, which is transitioning to its new name, Plan to be Kind, will live on alongside our program. Northmen Den will act as a fiscal sponsor for the program, and our organizations will collaborate on various initiatives to serve the students in Petoskey High School and the other schools Northmen Den serves in Emmet and Charlevoix counties.  “Together, we will continue to create key opportunities that embed kindness as part of the culture in our schools and further enable all our youth to thrive for that’s how powerful being kind makes a person,” Kathy Petersen, Director and Founder of Northmen Den Youth Pantries explained. 

“We feel like the collaboration of the Cheetos Club and Northmen Den Youth Services will spread true acts of kindness in a deeper and broader manner while touching even more lives for good,” Plan to be Kind shared about our partnership on its website.  

Among some of the ways the Cheetos Club / Plan to be Kind has left a mark on its school already include:

• Annual “Day of Kindness” in honor of Spencer and his birthday, September 28.
• Birthday bags delivered to every student for their birthday.
• Locker Love: Cheetos Club has access to students’ lockers to randomly give treats, cards and surprises to students. 
• Courtyard renovations, which transformed a forgotten alley into a beautifully landscaped refuge. 
• The 15 Northmen Den Youth Pantries (14 in Emmet County and one in Charlevoix) will have a “Kindness Closet” in each pantry for our youth pantry students to have access to trinkets, small stuffed animals, notes, cards that they can give to people they care about or want to show them that they matter to them.   

Lance called the courtyard one of the “best projects we did,” inspired by two students walking the school hallway and looking out the window looking into a jungle worth of weeds, tall grass, and overgrown foliage. Their conversation centered around: “Look at that rundown courtyard, that shows that nobody cares.” They quickly realized this was a super project for the Cheetos Club/Plan to be Kind, to work on to demonstrate how being kind makes all things better. 

“It sent a message to the kids. Something that everybody said is just a disaster ‘put the shades up so we don’t see it,” Lance said. Instead “They are the ones that changed that. First look in your school – what things can you do to impact? And let’s change it.”

That’s the biggest thing that Plan to be Kind can do – inspire everyone it touches to spread general kindness and experience a renewed sense of hope that it exists in others. Read more about the ways the Plan to be Kind has made an impact here.