The Affirmation Project is a public art practice by artist and writer Nicole Leth. It integrates anonymous, free, and unexpected gestures of care into the world—and has quietly reached over 100 million people. This is not a business or a non-profit. It’s part of Nicole’s ongoing art practice, rooted in tenderness, connection, and the belief that small, sincere acts can change the way we feel in the world.
POSTCARD PROJECT!
Every other month, I lovingly create thousands of postcards and send them to real human beings all over the world. For free. Each postcard features my writing and art. Every month, I sit down and write the realest words I know how, hoping they’ll feel real to you, too.
This is a free mailing service where anyone can sign up the people they care about. If you’ve received a postcard, it means someone thought of you and wanted to send a little love your way. I have sent out over 150,000 postcards since I started this project in 2019 and hope to continue it for the rest of my life.
I believe we all deserve to feel seen, known, and understood. And more than anything, I hope these postcards remind you that you are not alone.
Thank you for being here.
WAYS TO SUPPORT!
I believe that compassion should be free and accessible to all humans. The most important part of this project for
me is to keep it free in as many ways as I can.
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Because of this, My Affirmation Project has been totally funded by a network of donors, sponsorships, grants, and patrons for over 3 years. Their support has made this project sustainable and helped spread free compassion all over the globe.
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Every dollar raised goes right back into this project. Your support keeps this project alive.
About the artist:
Hi, my name is Nicole and I’m a 31-year-old artist, writer, and human being living in Asheville, North Carolina. I’m working to put words that matter into the world so that people will remember that they matter, too. Sometimes this world makes me feel powerless and heartbroken, but this is my way of fighting back and trying to create compassionate change and space for real humans to find real healing in whatever ways they need to.
I started this project in 2010 in response to losing my father to suicide after a long battle with addiction and mental illness. The early days of this project looked like a 17-year-old me driving around my Iowa town with a journal and a bag of spray paint, stopping at abandoned buildings and warehouses to paint anonymous words of compassion and affirmation for others to find. In a lot of ways, this project saved my life. It became a way for me to alchemize trauma and practice creating beauty out of the hard parts of life. It became a way for me to write the words that I needed to hear to help me heal and share them in anonymous and public ways in hope that they would help other humans heal, too.
Since then, this project has grown in ways I never could’ve imagined. It has become my full-time job and received support from global corporations, donors, grants, media outlets, and individuals that make expansion possible. The writing in this project is always written, designed, and produced by me and is always shared in anonymous, free, and accessible ways. Through this project, I have shared tender yet honest poem-like affirmations on road-side billboards, airplane banners, semi-trucks, barges, urban wheat-pasted posters, stickers, yard signs, hand-made quilts, fliers, and murals all over the world. I have partnered with cities, schools, hospitals, prisons, and psychologists to integrate compassion into their operations and environments. I also work to create iterations of this work that humans can engage directly with in an intimate way - I have built "free flower shops" in public spaces and created a mailing service in which 150,000 people have received hand-addressed postcards with my written affirmations on them every month for over six years.
I have posted over 600 anonymous affirmation billboards so far, in addition to hundreds of other tangible integrations of visual compassion. This work has been experienced by over 100 million people world-wide and was awarded a life-time achievement OBIE award in 2020.