Random acts of kindness may earn you a little more than knowing you did a good deed next week.
Tenth Avenue Plaza merchants have banded together to help promote International Pay It Forward Day on Thursday, April 26.
Participating merchants will be on the lookout for citizens doing random acts of kindness around the plaza that day.
No act is considered either too big or too small, and there should be no level of expectation in return other than the act should be paid forward.
“We’ll be rewarding people with gifts for their good deeds,” Serious Coffee owner Clay Edghill said.
“The people on the receiving end of the good deed will receive cards asking them to pay it forward.”
Merchants in participating stores will have draw boxes for doers of good deeds to enter their names for prize draws, Edghill said.
B.C. is one of two provinces that officially acknowledge Pay It Forward day and Edghill is calling on the city to issue an official proclamation of such a day, he said.
“It’s for the community and is something that we can all do for each other and hopefully keep going,” he said.
Edghill says he’s seen the 2000 movie Pay It Forward.
The movie is about a boy who, as part of a social studies project, comes up with the idea of doing good deeds for three people and having them pay it forward while asking others to pay it forward and watching the experiment grow exponentially.
Edghill says that his wife Meloney experienced “pay it forward” while on a trip to Alberta.
“She left change with a cashier at a coffee shop and asked them to pay for the next person’s coffee,” Clay said.
“She sat back and watched and said that the expression on people’s faces underlined the premise of the whole idea,” he said.
reporter@albernivalleynews.com