BUFFALO, N.Y. — "This one said I had a folder of documents that fell all over the street. Strangers stopped and helped me gather them up," said Saira Sadiqui.
Sadiqui calls herself a social practice artist.
"It's an artist that merges the civic engagement and community engagement with the art," she explained.
At her day job, Sadiqui is an urban planner for a nonprofit organization. It's a job that involves looking at a lot of maps.
"Mapping you know, crime statistics or wealth and health statistics," she said. "One day, I just stopped and I thought, where are all the peace dots? How do we even get that information, how do we collect that data?"
So, she launched the Peace Dots Project. Each brightly colored dot on her map, represents a of a random act of kindness. It started as an anonymous online forum for people to share their stories.
"You submit your random act of kindness, where and when it happened, a color, and an emotion," she said.
Sadiqui recently secured a state grant to scale the project and install large maps in the community for people to mark their dots and make their submissions in person. There's one in front of Stitch Buffalo on Niagara Street, and a second one just went up at the Broadway Market. But it's not just people from Buffalo submitting ideas anymore.
"We have close to 100 submissions so far, and I thought that it was really going to be super hyper-local to Buffalo," Saira said. "But I'm starting to get submissions from California, Texas, Illinois, Florida, as far as the U.K. and Germany."
Sadiqui plans to collect stories through the fall, then use them as inspiration for a series of oil paintings.
"Probably 10 to 20 large scale pieces that represent all of the submissions that come through, and I will hopefully show it somewhere in the community in 2023," she said.
So next time you're thinking about doing something nice for somebody, think of the dots, and how far a small gesture can really go.
"Part of the intrigue of this project was not knowing what was going to come in and what I was going to get," she said. "Seeing everything from someone smiled at me or complimented my outfit and seeing how something so small can make somebody's day, it's really just been such an inspiration. I feel like I'm sitting there getting these, you know, they come to my inbox, my email, and I'm reading them and then I just get such a big smile on my face."
To read the submissions to the Peace Dot Project or submit your own, click here.