It's Thanksgiving every day for a New Orleanian who inspires others to 'Just Bee Generous'
Published: Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 5:00 AM
By This is the time of year when we open our hearts and our wallets: taking food to the food bank, sending checks to worthy causes, buying presents for Toys for Tots and the Forgotten Angels. Kelly McAtee has come up with something better.
The McAttes, left to right: Collin, 17; Kelly and Lily, 2; Lindsay, 15; Cy, 5; Patrick and Reid, 11. “’Just be generous’ is just something I’ve told my kids since they were born,” McAtee says.
McAtee lives in Williamsburg, Va., with her husband, Patrick, and their five children, but she will always be a New Orleanian and “a Sacred Heart girl” at heart.
She has five pounds of CDM Coffee delivered every month, and in the summertime, she carries condensed milk with her when she’s on her way to a Virginia “snowcone” stand.
“We even have a St. Bernard that sits and watches the Saints games with us,” she says.
Most of her relatives still live in southeast Louisiana, but after she graduated from LSU, she and her fighter pilot husband traveled all over the world.
“I’ve been gone for a long time, but New Orleans contributed to who I am,” she says, “and how I’ve raised my children is a reflection of that.”
Teaching their kids kindness
A couple of years ago, the McAtees decided they needed to do something concrete to instill the idea of generosity in their children, so they started doing small random acts of kindness. They would anonymously pay for another family’s meal when they were eating at a restaurant or buy $25 gift cards and leave them on windshields in a parking lot with little notes.
“We wanted our kids to understand the virtue of giving without expecting anything in return,” McAtee says.
She remembers the first time she realized their son Reid, who was 9 at the time, got the concept. It had been a busy day filled with after-school activities, and she had just dropped off her oldest son at soccer practice. She stopped at a drive-up window to get a fast supper for her younger children and found herself in a long line of cars.
While they waited, she was talking to the children about being nice and she told them they were going to do something nice for someone they didn’t know. When she finally got up to the window, she told the woman she wanted to pay for the car behind them, too.
“The woman at the window did not seem happy being a Burger King employee,” McAtee says.
The woman curtly told McAtee she needed to pull up because part of her order would take a while.
“That wasn’t part of my plan, because I wanted to just be able to drive away without anyone seeing who we were,” she says.
Instead, the woman behind her got out of her car to ask why she had bought her dinner. When she explained that she was trying to teach her children about being generous, the woman was surprised.
“It was just a small meal, but she kept thanking us,” McAtee says. “She seemed awestruck by what we’d done.”
And when the drive-up window employee brought the rest of their order, she had a smile on her face. She said they had made her day.
“After we left, Reid said, ‘Mom, when you’re nice to someone, maybe it helps them be nice to someone else,’” McAtee says. “He totally got something out of it.”
'Just Bee Nice'
From that small incident, McAtee’s idea for “Just Bee Nice” began to evolve. She came up with a card to explain her mission, and her family helped design it, using a honeybee as part of the logo.
“It’s basically a pay-it-forward card that tells the recipient, ‘Pass this along when you have a chance to do a random act of generosity,’” she says.
The front shows a globe with the bee buzzing around it and says “Just bee generous to a total stranger for no reason at all,” and under that, “Can you be the bee?” On the back is an explanation and the Just Bee Generous website.
“I had no idea if anybody would log on to the website,” McAtee says. “It was really more of an experiment with our kids.”
She got 100 cards printed up on business-card paper, so they would hold up and be able to be passed along. And, beginning in the summer of 2010, each time they did an anonymous act of generosity, they’d leave a card behind.
Not long after they started leaving the cards, they began to get messages on their website from as far away as Canada, Europe and Asia.
“That continues to blow me away,” McAtee says. “I get people logging on from all over the world. This week I heard from someone in Austria.”
She added a place on the website where you can order five free cards after people started requesting them, and though she hasn’t kept track of exactly how many she’s sent out, she knows it’s more than 5,000.
“I get the weirdest requests,” she says. The Department of Labor in Washington state asked for 500 cards.”
Their most recent addition to the website is “Just Bee Generous” T-shirts that sell for $25 and come with three cards and a request that the receiver go out and perform three anonymous acts of generosity for three different people. If they make any profit from them, it will go toward acts of generosity, such as helping a family after a fire.
“Right now, they’re just paying for the cards,” McAtee says.
Most generous state: Louisiana
What she likes best about her generosity project is the change she’s seen in her children.
“Everybody in the house has the cards, and the kids will often do things on their own,” she says.
Collin, a high school senior, has spread the idea to his classmates.
“He has all these 17- and 18-year-olds using the cards,” she says.
She was also happy to discover how generous people in Louisiana are.
“People from Louisiana log in more than anybody else,” she says. “They log in and ask for cards every single day.”
McAtee thinks it’s because of the mindset we have here.
“I grew up learning generosity in New Orleans and in my family and at Sacred Heart,” she says.
She and Patrick have wondered if eventually one of the cards might circle back to them. So far, that hasn’t happened, but something even better did. For a long time after she started handing out the cards, she didn’t mention what she was doing to her mother, Gayle Petagna Sisk, who lives in Covington with McAtee’s step-dad, Fred Sisk.
About a week after McAtee told her about her family’s generosity project, her mom received a Just Bee Generous card in the mail along with a $100 gift card for Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
“All we know is the envelope had a New Orleans postmark,” McAtee says. “Neither one of us has any idea who sent it.”
Sheila Stroup's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in The Times-Picayune's Livingsection. Contact her at sstroup@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4831
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