Credit: 6 ABC News (screenshot).
Kristina Ulmer knew she had to do something to honor his sister’s memory.
Ulmer, who is a teacher at Hatboro-Horsham High School, wanted to keep her sister Katie Amodei’s legacy alive after she passed away in 2014 from a car accident.
In 2018, Ulmer found a way to pay it forward, which is exactly what her sister would have wanted.
She created a $20 Kindness Challenge, where students utilize a cash donation to do a good deed for someone else. Her efforts were recently recognized by 6 ABC Action News and she was featured in a spot on the news.
The challenge has been a huge success. A total of 351 acts of kindness have been performed, which translates into a little over $7,000 in donations. Some of the good deeds include:
Ulmer said the students’ hard work throughout this project has helped keep her sister’s legacy going.
“Everything that comes out of those kids’ mouths as they’re sharing what they did and what they learned, that’s my sister speaking,” Ulmer said.
Ulmer credits the idea when she found her sister's tip money from a waitressing job.
“My parents called me around midnight and told me she was in a car accident,” Ulmer said in the interview. “She had just waitressed that morning, so she had all of her tip money. And I pulled it out of her purse and thought, ‘What am I going to do with this money?’ I knew she would want to do something good with it. So, in memory of my sister, every semester, I give my students $20 to do an act of kindness.
According to Ulmer, her sister always wanted to do something to help people from a young age. She eventually settled on pursuing a career as an EMT and was applying to work on an ambulance around the time that she passed away.
Other teachers and parents in the school district became aware of the initiative and started to donate to the cause as well.
“I have enough to keep this going for the next couple years,” Ulmer said.
