Meet Andra Liemandt, the Austin Founder Teaching Emotional Literacy Through Kindness

For more than a decade, Andra Liemandt has helped thousands have deeper, more honest conversations about kindness. As founder and CEO of The Kindness Campaign, she built a national nonprofit that teaches emotional intelligence to children, teenagers and adults.

“I curate safe emotional health spaces that are interactive and creative for people to build emotional literacy,” Liemandt says. “And really, to build communities that are kinder.”

Long before The Kindness Campaign reached classrooms across the country, Liemandt was a mother trying to find the language for a tragedy. In 2015, a close friend’s 12-year-old daughter died by suicide after being bullied at school. Liemandt, mother of two young girls, found herself without the tools to discuss something so heavy.

“I needed a way as a mom to explain what was going on,” she says. “What I realized in that moment was that I really didn’t have the tools. I didn’t have the words.”

Without them, she improvised. At her kitchen table, using index cards and craft supplies, Liemandt and her daughters created Enoughie Buddy, a round, blue character who would go on to become the Campaign’s mascot and a familiar face in classrooms across the country.

“It was a way for me and my girls to have this conversation around something that felt really big,” she says.

The character’s name came from the message at the center of the organization’s work: I am enough.

The community that made it possible 

A Victoria native who studied kinesiology at Texas Lutheran University, Liemandt credits Austin’s philanthropic culture with helping carry The Kindness Campaign to a national reach. She remembers standing before a room of Austin ISD counselors with nothing but a pen and paper, then watching 50 schools sign up on the spot while RideAustin drivers volunteered to deliver the materials.

“People helped me pack it. People showed up,” she reflects. “That is what this community has always been about.”

Over the years, the conversation around kindness has changed.

“Eleven years ago, when I was talking about kindness, it was a very soft skill,” she says. “Today, I see it everywhere. It’s something anyone can learn. It’s something anyone can strengthen,” she says. “And it starts early. It starts at age 3.”

Building the next generation of leaders 

The Kindness Campaign, which is expected to serve 250,000 students this year, built a curriculum for preschoolers, teenagers and adults alike, including workplace workshops at companies such as H-E-B.

“We say we’re building emotionally healthy humans,” she says. “And whether you’re 3 or 83, the learning never stops.”

Increasingly, Liemandt is handing the work to young people themselves. The campaign’s Kind Leadership Program, a four-year incubator, pairs teenagers’ passions with a sense of purpose. 

“That is what excites me today,” she says. “I look at where the community is now and what the need is. And think ‘How can we help?’”

The next right thing

The work is rooted in lessons Liemandt learned from her parents, who have been married nearly 60 years and weathered personal and financial challenges during her childhood.

“I saw how they stuck it out together, and I saw the love that they had,” she says. “My mom came to the table at all times with open arms and love, not having all the answers, but doing the next right thing. And that’s what I learned to do. I was just doing the next right thing,” she says. “That’s what she did. And so that’s what I’m doing.”

What began at a kitchen table in Austin now reaches classrooms across the country. Through The Kindness Campaign, her Kind Leadership Program and her books, “Enoughie Buddy Finds His Superpowers” and “Enoughie Buddy and Friends: Superpowers Activated,” Liemandt continues to give people the language she once wished she had.

Today, she is curating kindness for a generation that will carry it forward.