'Oprah' talk show sparks Catholic students to help others

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CNS) - Oprah Winfrey recently gave each member of her television talk show audience $1,000, a digital video camera and a mission to use the money to help others.

The project has had ripple effect that has reached Nashville. Meghann Robinson, a sixth-grade teacher at St. Ann School in Nashville, was in Cincinnati over the Christmas holidays when she read a newspaper article about a teacher at a Cincinnati Catholic school who, inspired by Winfrey, gave each of her students $10 with the same mission the TV talk-show star gave her audience. Robinson decided to use her $250 Christmas bonus check to finance a similar project for her 25 students. She called it the Kindness Challenge. Robinson unveiled the Kindness Challenge by giving each student $10. They had three weeks to use the money for an act of kindness, but they could not help their friends, their family or themselves. "They just started running with it," Robinson said. "You could see how excited about it they were." Some students worked by themselves, others pooled their money and their efforts with classmates. After identifying a charity or organization they wanted to help, the students started increasing their $10. Through bake sales and donations the students ended up with a total of $1,800, including the original $250, Robinson said. They also collected a variety of donated items. "The kids had to keep a journal for the project and they had to keep a ledger for how they were spending the money," Robinson said. The students also had to have photo documentation for everything they did and used the photos on posters they made about their project, she added. Robinson wanted her students to connect with the people they were helping, so the students conducted interviews to find out what their chosen charities needed and in many cases delivered the donations personally. The students ended up helping a variety of organizations. Two girls used their seed money to buy ingredients to bake cookies that they sold. With the profits from the cookies and donations of money, the girls were able to deliver more than 100 items for the women and children assisted by the YWCA's Domestic Violence Center. Four girls held a book drive to collect books for Book'em, an organization that provides books to low-income families. Using donations of money and books, the four were able to deliver more than 200 books to Book'em. One group of students was inspired when they attended a recent concert by the University of Notre Dame Folk Choir. The choir was raising money to help a Catholic elementary school on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi that is still trying to recover from damage sustained in Hurricane Katrina. After checking with the Mississippi school to find out what was needed, the four students raised $220 that they sent to the school to use to buy copy paper. Mitchell Nelson collected $530 that he used to help the Safe Haven family homeless shelter. When he started collecting donations, he was hoping to collect between $100 and $200. But as he sent letters asking people to match the $10 donation Robinson had made, and started going door-to-door in his neighborhood, the money began adding up. "I was really excited" about the project, Mitchell said, "because I'd never done anything like this." Amy Rohling and Amy Gill paired up to help the House of Mercy, which provides a place to live and support to homeless mothers and their children. Its programs help the women recover from addiction and rebuild their lives. The two girls raised $90.03 and used the money to buy diapers, clothes, baby food, rattles, toy blocks, coloring books, crayons and tablet paper for the children at House of Mercy.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops