In October 2010 Hannah Brencher had recently moved to New York City. She was feeilng lonely and depressed when her heart one day was touched by a sad-looking woman she saw on the subway. She started writing a letter to that woman and before Hannah knew it she was writing love letters to strangers and tucking them away in libraries and cafes across the city, for people to randomly discover.
“I posted a kind of crazy promise to the Internet,” Hannah said on her blog. “If you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked.” Over the next year, she mailed out more than 400 hand-written letters. Today she runs The World Needs More Love Letters, a letter exchange dedicated to connecting strangers across the globe through the art of letter writing.
Watch her talk at [email protected] about how connecting with strangers taught her about community — in her words, “what a stranger might do for another stranger in that person’s life.”
Related:
- The World Needs More Love Letters (DailyGood article by Bela Shah)
- The World Needs More Love Letters (organization’s website)
- Hannah Brencher’s blog
- How It All Started (video by Hannah Brencher)
Home page image: sister72
