How a Westminster couple's 'Be Kind' sign became a movement

The first sign went up on a pole at Bond and Green streets in Westminster, Maryland, in January 2020. It was a small piece of wood with just two painted words: Be Kind.

A custom woodworker had gotten tired of the headlines. His partner, now his wife, had gotten tired of watching him get tired of them. There had been, she said, one too many "spiteful, hateful stories on the news."

So he made a sign and hung it up, then made another, and by the time anyone in Westminster had a name for what was happening, it was already spreading.

Now, just over six years after Eric Miller made the first Be Kind sign on their Westminster front porch, the movement he and Tina Miller built spans a nonprofit, a small business, a research project with a McDaniel College student and a six-week celebration that returns to town this August.

Taped to the bottom of a whiteboard in their home office are stickers reading "Teach Peace" and "Be Kind." "That's what he was giving out when I first met him," Tina said. The two met dancing to live music at Maggie's, a longtime restaurant and bar on Green Street in Westminster, just under a mile from where the first Be Kind sign would hang.

In 2018, in what they describe as an organic social experiment, Eric and Tina found a box of wooden hearts at a craft store, painted them red, added an infinity symbol and stamped the back of each one, turning a craft-store find into a tangible token of kindness they could hand to strangers.

The signs, the ones now nailed to fence posts and porch railings across Carroll County, Maryland, followed two years later: hand-delivered at first, then hand-painted to order and sold at farmers' markets and community events. The Millers said that as of this summer, they have stamped, painted and handed out more than 87,000 Infinite Love hearts, in addition to more than 20,000 Be Kind signs.

What began as a side project between a woodworker and a former Carroll County Public Schools employee is, in 2026, a registered business and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The business is Infinite Love Project, LLC, which operates Be Kind Signs. The nonprofit is Action For Kindness, run out of the Carroll Nonprofit Center on Clifton Boulevard. Tina serves as the nonprofit's executive director, while Eric is Action For Kindness' board president.

Every Be Kind sign might look similar to a passing driver. To Eric and Tina, each one carries a rough timestamp.

The oldest signs still standing have small, hand-drawn infinity hearts, no clear-coat finish and bare leftover plywood showing through the paint, all details of a process the couple hadn't yet standardized. The crayon-shaped design came early, too, created specifically so the message would land with kids, according to a company history video the Millers produced. Though all the signs carry the same message of hope for neighborly behavior, each one is like an artifact from a different era to the two people who crafted them.

The first batches of those older signs are like the one at what's now Burger Land at the corner of Main and Washington. The storefront has changed hands twice since that sign went up, and each new owner kept it. JeannieBird Baking Company and RockSalt Grille were among the other early downtown businesses to put signs in their windows, according to the Millers and the company history video.

In the video, Eric and Tina trace some of the project's best-known designs back to specific requests. The Maryland flag sign, now their most popular design, started as a custom order from a friend. A rainbow-crayon version came from another friend, who bought three: one for her own home and one for each of her parents', so her newborn would see the design everywhere the family went. The designs are available in eight languages, according to the video.

The tools that make the signs have their own history. The wooden stencils Eric uses to spray-paint the signs' lettering have been reused so many times that the crust of dried paint on them has built up in layers, a look the couple jokingly call "the pensioners." They've talked about eventually sanding them down and selling them as standalone art pieces, a retirement plan built out of shop scraps.

As for where it all started: the pole at Bond and Green still holds a sign today, its third since 2020, currently a blue crayon design. Summer tree cover hides it from the street for roughly half the year.

Before the signs were fixtures throughout Carroll County, their pull showed itself in an unexpected place: a rock concert.

The Millers brought a batch of signs to a performance by Better Off Dead, a Grateful Dead tribute band, at the Tally Ho Theater in Leesburg, Virginia, and lined the front of the stage with them.

A friend of the Millers, Sonny Trippel, was performing with the band, and she started handing out Be Kind signs to the crowd during the encore. Tina said people still come up to her years later to say the Tally Ho show was the first place they ever saw a Be Kind sign.

Eric and Tina formalized the business as an LLC in February 2020, weeks before COVID-19 shutdowns closed much of downtown Westminster. The timing could have killed the project. Instead, a local farmers’ market gave it a stage.

"Brooke Hagerty was the market manager at the Downtown Westminster Farmers' Market, and she said, 'Bring your positivity here. We would love to have you,’" Tina said.

Not everyone at the market was immediately sold on the idea of a sign vendor setting up next to the produce stands. "There was a little bit of pushback, like, 'Well, it's not produce,'" Eric said. He credits Hagerty with shutting that down fast. "Brooke Hagerty's a badass. She's like, 'You want to run the market?!'"

The bet paid off quickly. "We would go there and have like a thousand-dollar day selling signs," he said. Over the next three years, the Millers say in their history video, they carried the signs to more than 300 markets and festivals around central Maryland.

As the requests and donations grew past what two people selling out of a market booth could manage, the couple partnered with the Community Foundation of Carroll County to formalize Action For Kindness as a fund, giving the project the administrative backing to accept larger community donations and apply for grants that wouldn't go to an unincorporated craft business.

Action For Kindness incorporated as its own 501(c)(3) in 2023 but remains a component fund of the foundation, which still handles its administration.

The arrangement lets the founders run two entities side by side: Infinite Love Project handles commercial sales of signs, hearts, stickers and T-shirts, while Action For Kindness funds community programs, including the Westminster Kindness Stroll, without the two revenue streams tangling.

The market gave the project its financial footing. Its regional expansion, by the founders' account, came from a stranger source: Eric's day job during the early months of the pandemic.

At the time, he was working as a solo caretaker for a property on the Chesapeake Bay, a job that kept him classified as an essential worker while much of the state shut down. For a long stretch of 2020, he made the drive between Westminster and Annapolis on highways that were, for those months, close to empty.

Eric said he used the COVID-era commute to install signs along the route as he went, adding steadily to the project's regional footprint at a time when the business had almost no other way to reach new towns. Friends helped carry the project further still, buying signs to install in their own neighborhoods.

Much of Action For Kindness' current work runs through Carroll County Public Schools, and the founders describe a funding pattern that shapes where they can operate.

Elementary schools are the easiest sell, largely funded through PTA-sponsored events. "Elementary school is easy because the PTAs love funding interactive family nights," Tina said. High schools tend to have their own budgets through groups like National Art Honor Society chapters and Sources of Strength programs.

Middle school is different. "Middle school is a financial dead zone, the exact age where bullying peaks is where school activities funding standardly dries up," Tina said.

To close that gap, Action For Kindness funnels its own grant money into middle school workshops, including one at West Middle School in Westminster, so the sessions are free for the school. "It's the sweet spot, the middle schools," Tina said. "They're bringing us back every year. What worked at West Middle is what we know we can just duplicate."

The workshops also draw adults. Thomas Beyard, who spent 30 years on Westminster's city staff before being appointed to the Common Council in April 2026, paid for four of the couple's workshops across Carroll County several years ago and attended the one at the Westminster library.

At the library event, Beyard made a sign in the green, blue and yellow of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines flag, an island nation he has visited many times, with a red heart and the letters SVG inside. "When I look at the sign it gives me good thoughts about the place, people I've met and things I've done," Beyard wrote in a text message. "It's very calming and that's what it's all about."

He said the signs work in the other direction, too. "Wherever you go and see a 'Be Kind' sign, it makes you also think of Westminster and the great people here," he wrote. "But getting involved in the workshop was just fun. I never thought I was an artist, but I did it."

Action For Kindness is also trying to quantify the impact of those workshops. "We're working right now with a student at McDaniel College from the sociology department to put together a survey to gauge the general public," Tina said. "How have the signs impacted you as someone who lives in Westminster, where they started? We want to prove it's a good thing, so we're trying to measure it."

The nonprofit wants to build a gamified data-collection tool that can track responses over multiple years and show whether proximity to the signs and the workshops correlates with any change in behavior.

McDaniel College has been the project's steadiest institutional partner, and the relationship runs through its art department.

Chloe Irla, an associate professor of art who now serves as assistant dean of faculty development, began using the signs in her classes while she was chairing the department. She bought them in bulk as a canvas for her graphic design and public art courses.

What Irla admires is that the project gives art students a real-world example of their field at work in public. "It's a really great model for our art students, especially to think about how art can kind of live and thrive in the world, and having this really local connection that makes a huge impact socially," she said. "That's a really good example of what you can do with very simple materials that people really embrace."

The signs her students painted in class ended up downtown. Eric and Tina asked that the whole set be displayed at the Kindness Stroll. "It was a really great bridge opportunity for students to have their work showcased downtown," Irla said.

Two of her graphic design students have done semester-long internships with the Millers, designing the promotional materials the nonprofit uses to book its workshops. "Tina and Eric are very nurturing, and I know that they're going to be really great supports for our students," Irla said.

The couple have also worked with the faculty. Irla plans McDaniel's annual faculty development retreat each August and invited them to run a session on their sixth-grade anti-bullying workshop. Professors painted their own signs and hung them in their campus offices. "It was a hit," Irla said, adding that faculty now request the activity every year.

The project's highest-profile recognition came out of a trip to the State House that had nothing to do with lobbying for the signs themselves. The Millers went to Annapolis to support an anti-bullying bill backed by a friend, and left with what they call an accidental friendship with one of the chamber's leaders.

"We're down at the State House to support an anti-bullying bill that our friend is doing, and Del. Diana Fennell, she's from PG County, she's the House whip. Her daughter sees [my Maryland flag Be Kind] briefcase, and she just heads over to us," Eric said. "I'm like, 'Oh my god, what did I do wrong?' I'm clutching her hands, and she just loved the message. I'm friends with the House whip from PG County!"

Fennell served as the House's deputy majority whip from 2019 to 2025 and is now assistant speaker pro tem.

Then-House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones granted the pair an audience of her own. "We got to meet Speaker Adrienne Jones. We got 15 minutes with her, and she said, 'It's on my heart to help you,' so she got us an earmark grant," Tina said.

Eric and Tina said their Be Kind signs have now reached at least 42 states and nine countries, including placement among U.S. military personnel deployed in Iraq.

The workshop model has also moved into settings further from classrooms or market stalls. The Millers said Action For Kindness runs team-building workshops for corporate clients, including T. Rowe Price, and has partnered with Maryland Treatment Centers to deliver trauma-informed versions of its workshops in recovery settings.

After years of hauling signs and hearts to weekly markets, the Millers said they're moving the business toward a wholesale model, partnering with local shops to carry and distribute the signs rather than vending in person every weekend. It's a practical shift for a two-person operation that has spent years absorbing the physical toll of market vending, and it frees up time for the nonprofit's biggest annual production: the Westminster Kindness Stroll.

The fourth annual Kindness Stroll opens with a kickoff celebration Thursday, Aug. 20, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Locust Lane, across from the library in downtown Westminster, when student-designed Be Kind artwork goes up in the windows of downtown merchants. The window displays run through Sept. 23, when the signs come down and move to Westminster Fallfest for final voting.

Community members vote for their favorite designs through a dollar-per-vote system that raises money for the Community of Kindness Workshop Program and the nonprofit's Kids Kindness Grants. Students will also carry their signs in the Westminster Fallfest Parade on Sept. 24, with a closing celebration and artist recognition ceremony Sunday, Sept. 27, at 1 p.m. on the Fallfest Stage in Westminster City Park.

Action For Kindness is courting local business sponsors for this year's Stroll, with sponsorship options ranging from the $150 Friends level to the $1,000 Premier level.

In their history video, the Millers describe a goal beyond the wholesale shift: getting a Be Kind workshop in front of every student in Maryland at some point in their schooling, rather than just the Carroll County schools the nonprofit currently serves. The McDaniel research project is meant to help make that case. If the gamified survey can show a measurable link between the signs and how people in the community feel, Eric and Tina said, it becomes easier to persuade schools and donors who haven't yet signed on.

But wherever the project goes from here, the basics are the same as they were at the start: a piece of wood, two words, a Westminster woodworker who got tired of the headlines, and a partner helping him do something about it.