Laura Waldorf Reiss is a Community Builder, Mentor, and Catalyst for Collective Good
She’s built her work at the intersection of human connection and real-world impact. As the founder of Kindness Matters, Laura has worked across North America and internationally, bringing people together, mobilizing communities, and turning simple ideas into meaningful, tangible initiatives.
Everything Laura builds is made of small moments — one room, one conversation, the point where something changes between two people.
Infrastructure happens through connection.
Communities get mobilized, resources move toward the people already doing the work, partnerships form across borders, and ideas become things that actually exist — one relationship at a time, on the ground, by hand.
Practical, teachable, built to spread.
Meet Laura Waldorf Reiss
Laura Waldorf Reiss is a builder.
She spent nearly two decades growing Kindness Matters from a single idea into an international organization that now thrives under its own leadership.
Today she works across continents, connecting people and resources from grassroots communities to the highest levels of philanthropy and government.
Real connection, real capacity, real community — the same three things in a village and in a boardroom.
What she builds is made to outlast her: networks that hold on their own, partnerships with enough weight behind them to move policy and not just projects, communities that keep going long after a funding cycle closes.
Real community gets built in person.
Most of Laura’s year is spent somewhere it’s being built — on a stage, at a retreat, in a village, or in a room where the funding gets decided.
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Led by Laura, small, curated groups gather in Tamarindo, Costa Rica and Breckenridge, Colorado. Days built around movement, real conversation, and ritual held in nature. A week of being in community rather than holding one together. Connect with Laura to find out more and to join the waitlist.
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A TEDx speaker, Laura takes a small number of engagements each year. Her most popular talk is Leader, Not Savior: The Hidden Cost of Being the Strong One. Her talks center around what real connection asks of us and what it makes possible — between two people, across a difference, across a border. Connect with Laura to find out where she’s speaking next, or to book her.
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Laura convenes across countries, connecting the people doing the work on the ground with the organizations and funders who can carry it further. It’s where most of her year goes, and where capacity gets built that outlasts any one funding cycle. Connect with Laura to start the conversation.
Remembering Kindness
From a childhood rooted in warmth and generosity to navigating challenges like dyslexia, loneliness, and personal transformation, this talk is a powerful reminder that kindness isn’t something we learn. It’s something we return to. Through real life stories and science backed insights, she shares how small, intentional acts of compassion can shift our perspective, regulate our nervous system, and create meaningful connection in our everyday lives. This isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about the quiet choices we make, moment by moment, that shape how we show up for others and for ourselves.
