Manitou Springs High School’s Campaign for Kindness has launched a new campaign with the title “beYOUtiful.” It may seem like a silly play on words or even a marketing phrase, but for the members of the club, it means so much more than that.

“It’s really important to spread our message because I think we need to encourage each other to be ourselves even if it’s not the most popular thing,” says member and MSHS sophomore Ryan Cantwell.

The club, which meets once a week on Wednesdays during lunch, has searched for a way to communicate their message to the student body as a whole. The perfect opportunity arrived when the club was offered a spot in the video announcements that are shown to the entire school during advisory every Tuesday. Senior Diana Blake jumped on the opportunity and planned a video that focused on a person’s inner beauty rather than their appearance.

To gain the content for the video, members of Campaign for Kindness, or “C for K”, were asked to record people they interviewed as they answered one simple yet meaningful question: “What is a quality within someone that makes them beautiful?”

Throughout the past couple of years, the club has been trying to emphasize the need for people to simply be kind to each other. They noticed that most of the bullying in American high schools is based on looks. The result is that teenagers, both boys and girls, change who they are in order to please those around them. Campaign for Kindness wants to spread the message that it should not be what you look like that decides how people are treated, and rather the way that they treat others.

“I think it’s a combination of pressure from the media and the way us teens are so easily influenced,” says sophomore Brooke Warbington. “If the only ‘beautiful’ people we see on TV are caked in makeup and wearing clothes that leave nothing to the imagination, that’s what we’re probably going to do to try and fit that mould. I really like this special campaign we have because it tells us, especially girls, that we don’t need to try and be something we’re not, we just need to be ourselves. I just think that’s really awesome.”

To set a positive example for the student body, the members of C for K decided to go to school wearing plain everything, to highlight that they don’t care about how each other looks but rather that they’re kind people. They wore plain white shirts, simple pants such as blue jeans, and absolutely no hair treatment or makeup.

“I thought it was a really cool way to get us out of our comfort zones and really practice what we preach,” says Warbington.