KINDNESS CAMPAIGN
How an Austin mom’s vision is spreading understanding in schools
On a darkened stage at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, Andra Liemandt’s vision is coming to life with
the help of three puppeteers and many others behind the scenes.
On a playground, a little girl named Esme plays with a doll her grandmother gave her. A little boy named Hector isn’t feeling so great
about his life, so he takes Esme’s doll. Then Enoughie, a round ball of blue fur with magical antenna tuned to kids’ feelings comes to the playground to help each kid sort out why they acted the way they did and how they can resolve the conflict they felt in the future.
Liemandt could not have imagined the trajectory her character Enoughie has taken when she started the Kindness Campaign in 2015, two years after a friend’s 12-year-old daughter committed suicide after being bullied.
Now, the Kindness Campaign is in 82 schools, it’s been chosen as a charity for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation and, on Friday, “Las Aventuras de Enoughie (The Adventures of Enoughie)” from Zach Theatre, Teatro Vivo and Glass Half Full Theatre open ed at the Mexican American Cultural Center.
Becoming Enough
Liemandt, 44, grew up in Victoria as a ballet dancer who also played basketball and ran tra ck. She did gymnastics and karate. She was s tudent council president. She knows she didn’t experience the same things kids today are experiencing in their schools.
She studied kinesiology at Texas Lutheran University. She was an aerobics director at a sports club and then in Sun City in Georgetown. She ended up working at Dell Inc. in large corporate accounts before working in pharmaceutical sales at Abbott Laboratories.
And then she married husband Joe and became a mom to two girls, Kate, 11, and Elle, 9. Her life had shifted. When Kate was 3, Liemandt enrolled her
in piano lessons. Kate’s piano teacher needed a drum mer for an all-mom band, the Mombas, and asked Liemandt, who had never played drums but had some rhythm from her days as a ballerina. In high school, Liemandt had also dated a guy who played drums and remembered picking up his sticks and messing around with the drums. Those were all of her qualifications.
She had three weeks to learn how to play two songs. She did. It ignited a spark.
She asked her friends if they would want to gather together and, instead of joining a book club, join a band. They would learn to play instruments together.
At first they were called the Cover Girls because the yw ere girls and they played cover songs. There were eight mem- bers initially. They practiced for six months and learned two songs. They dressed in matching black dresses, reminiscent of the girls in a Rob- ert Palmer video, and invited their husbands to watch them.
“It was horrible,” she said, but people started booking them as an opening act.
And then, Liemandt thought, what if they actu- ally learned to write their own music? They connected with Austinite and former Go-Go Kathy Valentine, who taught them how them how to write music.
T hey were no longer the Cover Girls. They had grown up. Many dropped out because of other interests or lack of time. Others joined, and now Liemandt and her band of four are the Mrs. — Liemandt on drums, Jenny Mason on bass, Larissa Ness on keyboard and Mandy Prater on guitar.
They sing songs to uplift women, sometimes with humor, always with a strong dose of reality. “We’re writing songs with purpose,” she says. Their biggest hit, “Enough,” reiterates the theme that we all are enough.
Preventing another tragedy
As a mom, though, Liemandt was seeing some things in her own daughters that she didn’t like. Some of that self-doubt, that listening and looking to others for validation. She knew that what her own daughters were experiencing was noth- ing like what she had experienced as a child.
She realized how things were changing for them about how they felt about themselves. “At first, I really wanted to know how to connect with my own kids,” she says. “I was just doing this because I was scared.”
She wanted there to be a way where kids could connect to their own feelings as well as a way to connect to other people’s feelings. She wanted to teach kids how to be kind.
Before she realized it, she was creating the Kindness Campaign. She came up with a character that kids could talk to called Enoughie Buddy.
Enoughie was different. First, he was blue; second, he was adopted. But Enoughie also was the same as every kid. He feels sad, he feels scared, he feels excited. He’s trying to figure out the rules of school and life, too. Even though Liemandt is the daughter of a teacher and a mom, she knew she needed experts. She brought in Lori Hobbie, who had decades of experience teaching and creating curriculum.
They started talking to the Austin Independent School District. They learned t hat there was a lot out there for the older elementary school kids and middle school kids, but noth- ing really for prekindergar- ten to third grade. Liemandt promised to deliver a curriculum in two months and pres- ent it to 70 elementary school counselors at a training.
That first journal was called “I Am Enough,” and it had the idea of a magic mirror that would tell kids that they are enough, among other amaz- ing things about them. The curriculum had activities for counselors or teachers to do with the kids, activities for kids to do on their own and activi- ties for them to do with their caregiver at home.
When Liemandt introduced it to the counselors at the train- ing, they rushed her table to sign up. “It was overwhelm- ing,” she says. She couldn’t answer the questions fast enough. She couldn’t find the pens. She kept thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I have no idea what I’m doing.”
The program was piloted at five schools in 2015-2016, went into 50 schools in 20162017 and is in 82 schools this year. Schoo ls are given the curriculum, which includes a teacher’s guide and differ- ent age-level journals for the kids, depending on their writ- ing abilities. T hey a lso can bring the interactive show to their campus.
In the show, kids see a pre- sentation and then each kid gets time in front of the magic mirror. The mirror asks them questions and then reminds them to always remember a quality that they have that makes them enough.
Bringing Enoughie to life
Like many things before, the start of “Las Aventuras de Enoughie (The Adventures of Enoughie)” began with a conversation. Liemandt met Nat Miller, education director at Zach Theatre, at a fundraiser for the theater. She told him what she was doing, and they agreed to meet for coffee.
It became clear from their conversation that Enoughie should be a play, and he needed to be a puppet, and the play should be bilingual. Miller brought in Caroline Reck of Glass Half Full Theatre for her puppetry expertise and Mario Ramirez of Teatro Vivo for his bilingual theater expertise. The three had worked together three years before for “Cenicienta,” a bilingual Cinderella story with an actor telling the story using puppets made out of found objects.
Reck wrote the story based on the curriculum she saw from Liemandt along with ideas from the actors at Teatro Vivo. “There has to be a reason for being bilingual,” says Ramirez. It’s not just enough to throw in some Spanish. The characters of Esme and Hector have a background as kids growing up in a bilingual household. One character speaks the Spanish of Mexico, one speaks the Spanish of the Rio Grande Valley. The goal is for it to be reflective of the community.
Reck knew it was important for Enoughie to be childlike enough to be relatable, but also wise. She didn’t want him to deliver the lesson but rather help the kids figure out the lesson themselves. “He’s adult in a sense and not grown up in a sense,” says Adam Martínez, who plays Enoughie. “He’s enigmatic. He has a lot of non sequitur lines.”
He had to be fun for the kids, Ramirez says.
“Social emotional learning can be boring,” Reck adds.
“It can feel like medicine,” says Marina DeYoe-Pedraza, who plays Esme.
“The story is relatable,” Martínez says. “It’s who kids are, where they are and what they are feeling.” Reck is using a style of puppetry that is a mashup, with elements of Muppets, tabletop puppetry using rods and her own hybrid of meth ods. The three actors work together to move the puppets. Ramirez, who plays Hector, and Martínez and DeYoe-Pedraza had to learn the puppetry themselves, having had little experience before.
While the Kindness Campaign materials Reck saw skewed younger, the play is written with a first-grade, second-grade crowd in mind because of the number of school groups that will see it.
For Liemandt, the play is turning a dream into a reality.
“It was just a thought,” she says of Enoughie. “Then he’s up there talking and making kids laugh.”
She has big dreams for the Kindness Campaign and how to, through partnerships, bring it to more schools and more places. She gets inquiries from around the country and beyond.
“I have the path,” she says. “We just need the funding.”
Her hope is that as kids who experience the Magic Mirror and Enoughie grow up, they will bring self-worth and kindness with them. Until then, “This is going away,” she says of bullying.
Yet every kid she got to be the voice behind the mirror for is a reminder of why she is continuing to bring the Kindness Campaign to more and more kids in their schools and now on the stage.
“I feel honored to be in this position,” she says. “It is a gift to be in this role.”