Naomi Colville said panic quickly set in when her neurodivergent daughter didn’t come home after her first day of high school.

“My heart rate went up and I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, my 12-year-old daughter’s in the wilderness somewhere’, and I don’t know where.”

She was just about to contact police and send them a photo when her daughter walked through the front door, two hours late and completely unfazed.

Colville’s daughter had missed her bus stop, so she had walked several kilometres along the wrong side of the busy Surf Coast highway on a sweltering hot day.

She later told her mum she planned to walk the whole way home – an additional 10km – to Geelong. But then a stranger, only known to Colville as Phoebe, pulled over, picked her stranded daughter up and drove her home.

“How many hundreds of vehicles were on that road for the three kilometres she was walking … how many cars actually drove past and thought, ‘that’s weird, well I’ll keep driving’,” Colville said.

If drivers are concerned that someone is lost, a good strategy is to stop and ask if the person is OK, and even better to stay with them and call police.

Still, Colville was very grateful her daughter was home – but she was in a bind.

“I didn’t have any way of contacting Phoebe to say thank you,” she said.

Instead, she posted an account of what had happened to a Facebook page called the Kindness Pandemic, with the “hope the universe made it right with Phoebe”.

“It’s comforting to know that the world is filled with humans who, when they see something not quite right or a person who might need help, step up,” she says..

The Facebook page, created in 2020 during the pandemic, now has over 520,000 members who continue to share stories of kindness.

The founder of the page, Catherine Barrett, says she started it because people were becoming scared, anxious and aggressive during the pandemic and lockdowns. She recalls the stockpiling of toilet paper and a story of a supermarket cashier who had bruises up their arms.

At its peak, Barrett says she was told by Facebook that Kindness Pandemic was the fastest-growing group in the world, sometimes gaining 50,000 new members a day. It grew so quickly the page glitched out, she says, prompting Facebook to assist.

“People came to our group because they were frightened and they needed each other, and we still do now.”

Melissa Williams, who helps manage the page, says the power of social connectedness and its value to people is clear. “It’s more important now than ever,” she says.

“If lockdown taught us anything, it’s how many people are experiencing social isolation and the detrimental effects that can have.”

Williams runs the non-profit charity Positive Attitude Inc, originally formed to support men with HIV in the 1980s whose friends were “dying all around them” and who “didn’t know how long they had”.

Now, the charity coordinates free weekly lunches, with around 20 regular attenders, and a Christmas lunch. Those who come are mostly older long-term HIV survivors and for many it’s a rare social outing, she says.

“We’re like a family, their chosen family … they know we’re a safe space for them, and they’ll always get any support they need.”

Another story shared in the Kindness Pandemic group is of a stranger mailing Sandy Roswell her lost wallet – with everything still in it.

It reminded Roswell there are “still honest and kind people out there”.

The wallet was mailed a few months after it was lost, by which point Rowsell had accepted it was gone.

“It was a godsend, I couldn’t believe it.”