Pittsfield woman spreading the joy by passing the plates

PITTSFIELD – About a year ago, as Jean Gervais contemplated her approaching 50th birthday, she began taking stock of her life and wondering what was next.

She had a lovely home on Sibley Pond, a great husband, two grown, married, successful children, and three wonderful dogs. With her husband, Robert Gervais, she operated two local businesses: Garden Island Cleaners in Newport and Butler’s Cleaners in Waterville.

Life was good. Life was settled and of great quality. And she would have been perfectly content except, as her birthday approached, she kept hearing a nagging voice telling her that she should do more, give more, do something meaningful.

“I was asking myself, ‘Oh my God, what can I do now that I’m grown up?'” Gervais said Monday. “And then it hit me. I decided to do everything and anything I can to be nice.”

Gervais said it is such a simple philosophy that it often is misunderstood. “Here I was thinking I had to do something big when all along it was something small.”

It wasn’t about what she could get, but rather what she could give, she discovered. So, as she pondered that concept, Gervais created Cultivate Kindness plates.

“It’s not really about the plates,” she was quick to say. “It’s about the concept, the idea of passing along kindness.”

This is how it works: You buy a Cultivate Kindness plate, each of which comes with its own journal. Then you commit an act of kindness, such as baking brownies, putting them on the dish and giving them and the journal to a friend who is having a hard time. That friend in turn fills the plate with candy and passes it on to a student who just made the honor roll. That student then fills the plate with IOUs for chores and gives the dish to her mom, who is working long hours. And so the kindness goes, from one person to the next.

Each transition is marked in the journal and entered into an online diary so each recipient can track the journey of the individually numbered plate. When not being used, Gervais said, the plates can be displayed as reminders to do at least one kind deed a day.

Gervais hand-paints each plate, some with garden flowers, others with snowmen for Santa’s cookies. They are offered in lupine blue and sea green and are so lovely that customers often buy two: one to give away and the other to keep.

It isn’t the plates themselves, but how they make the givers feel that motivates Gervais.

“In this small way, you can feel you made a difference,” she said. “You don’t have to donate billions. It may be as simple as helping someone in the grocery store.

“This is truly the gift that is meant to be regifted. Being nice doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. What if we all made a conscious effort to show more kindness in small ways? Think of the possibilities.”

Gervais said, “We are all bombarded on a daily basis with bad news: oil prices, the economy, wars. We hear it all day, every day. Wouldn’t a little good news be welcome?”

But Gervais is not one to stop once she has a good idea and not one to take the money she makes on the plates and hoard it. To further the idea of passing along kindness, she donates 20 percent of the price – nearly the entire profit margin – to Habitat for Humanity in Bangor, all of which stays in the state of Maine.

“I have no hidden agenda,” Gervais said. “It just makes me feel good.

“Life doesn’t have to be elaborate. It doesn’t have to consist of a lot of material things. It can be as simple as one act of kindness.”

Gervais’ plates can be purchased only online at www.

cultivatekindness.com.