Spread Love

In Columbia, Jonathan McKinney leads a one-man campaign to spread love wherever he might be.

He’s always wearing a wooden heart lapel pin with a design he crafted on the front and a message on the back — “Spread Love.” If someone asks about the pin or brings it up in conversation, he takes it off and passes ownership to them.

“I think I do it more as an outward expression, a small outward expression, of something that I think we all should do. So, I don’t think that the goal is for me to feel good,” McKinney, 49, said. “The goal is for me to sacrifice something that I really like, right? And it’s in that feeling of sacrifice that you actually find the love, which is weird.”

During the Howard County Pride Festival two years ago, McKinney was drawn to a booth that had a bowl of wooden hearts that looked handmade, each misshapen. He picked up a heart that caught his eye, and the person running the booth told him he could keep it. McKinney then got the idea to take it home, add a design and make it into a pin.

People constantly asked about the heart pin when he was out. One day, about a year and a half after he had made the pin, someone asked about it while he was out for Easter brunch when visiting home in Detroit. He felt compelled to give it to her, even though the heart was special to him. Upon returning to Maryland, he sought to replace the original heart pin.

He decided that he would make pins that he liked as much as the fi rst, and if anyone were to ask him about it in the “same spirit of giving on that Easter Sunday,” he would give it to them. Often, people are surprised when they hear he’s giving them something at no cost and that there’s no expectation to pass it forward.

Jessamine Duvall, executive director of Columbia Housing Center, was caught off guard when McKinney gave her a pin during a recent fundraiser for her organization. She always tries to leave people smiling in her daily interactions, so she complimented his heart. McKinney’s act was a reminder that being surrounded by people who care “is what it’s all about,” and it made her think about how she could spread more love herself.

“I just thought it was really nice that he was so selfl ess, and just sort of said, ‘Here you can have it,'” Duvall said. “And, you know, it does make me think ... it would be good for all of us to spread a little more love around just voluntarily, to just let people know that we care.”

McKinney moved to Maryland in 2016 to serve as a regional director for the NAACP. While working for the NAACP, he helped secure funding for a garden at the Community Ecology Institute’s Freetown Farm in Columbia. Spending time outdoors at the farm was an escape for him during the COVID-19 pandemic after he lost his job. He joined the board of directors at the Community Ecology Institute and later stepped down to become its director of operations.

Growing up in Detroit, seeing the effects of systemic racism, the impact of crack in the community, disparities in health care and other areas, and being involved in the church, McKinney was propelled into community action and organizing.

“And again, I couldn’t defi ne it at the time, but I knew it was wrong, and I knew it was an issue, and I also understood, because my mother is so giving, that people need help and people need to be heard,” he said. It’s his mother’s giving spirit that influenced him, and coming from being surrounded by love and charity, he hopes to inspire people in Howard County, where they can be “siloed” and not as neighborly. Along with the inspiration from his mother, McKinney also draws on his faith in his campaign to spread love.

The message is “the essence of who we are,” McKinney said, and today’s society has taken things like spreading love through creativity or sacrifi ce from people. Individuals have fewer things to sacrifi ce, they might be emotionally drained, or they haven’t been taught to sacrifi ce, McKinney said, instead giving and expecting something in return. With the current state of the world, it’s important to share the message, he said.

The past few years have been difficult for people across the country, whether politically or economically, said local Democratic activist Sanjay George, and the world needs more people like McKinney who are creating spaces for community members to come together. McKinney is “like a cup that is always trying to pour into other people,” and his work inspires George to be a “helper,” he said. “And then all of a sudden, it’s just this one heart that you got from this guy Jonathan, and then, you know, you help somebody else, it makes their day better, they help somebody else,” George said. “And it’s interesting to see how tangible the effect is of something so small like a little wooden heart, right?”

McKinney has spread love to about 60 or 70 people with his pins. Though he doesn’t have concrete plans for the future, he’d like to see where things grow, hoping maybe it’ll lead to a coalition of people with hearts doing different things, he said. He doesn’t want to accept donations or monetize the movement, rather keeping it “small enough where no one wants to take advantage of it,” but “big enough where it makes an impact.”

“It’s enough hurt and pain, so if we can heal one person at a time and spread a little love one person at a time, let people know they’re seen, they are seen and appreciated one person at a time, I think that we can heal some of the things that we are suffering from,” he said.

By KIERSTEN HACKER

PUBLISHED: November 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM EST