Pay it Forward

Consider the following paragraph from the Pay it Forward Foundation website:

Reuben St. Clair, the teacher and protagonist in the book “Pay It Forward,” starts a movement with this voluntary, extra-credit assignment: THINK OF AN IDEA FOR WORLD CHANGE, AND PUT IT INTO ACTION. Trevor, the 12-year-old hero of “Pay It Forward,” thinks of quite an idea. He describes it to his mother and teacher this way: "You see, I do something real good for three people. And then when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward. To three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven." He turned on the calculator, punched in a few numbers. "Then it sort of spreads out, see. To eighty-one. Then two hundred forty-three. Then seven hundred twenty-nine. Then two thousand, one hundred eighty-seven. See how big it gets?"

As readers of this blog may recall, I am doing some consulting work for a foundation that is disseminating the film, Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good. Nicholas Winton, a twenty nine year old English stockbroker, saved 669 children, mostly Jewish, from Prague before the Nazis invaded in 1939. Many of the children who Winton saved made incredible contributions to the world in their own right, including Baron Alfred Dubs, British MP, famed film director Karl Reisz, and Joseph Schlesinger.

I'm thinking very seriously about writing a book about the "children" who Winton saved. The purpose of the book would be to demonstrate that "one" act of goodness truly can prompt many other acts.