Fontbonne students start ‘Pay it Forward’ service project
Combining the lessons of a pope with the message of a Hollywood movie, juniors at Fontbonne Hall Academy have started a unique community service project. The goal of the endeavor, called Project One4All, in reference to 2014, the year the girls will graduate, is to promote positive change in people’s lives by performing charitable deeds, according to school officials.
Juniors at the girls’ Catholic High school in Bay Ridge studied Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris in religion class this semester. Fifty years ago, the pope issued a paper in which he famously urged Catholics to serve humanity and work for world peace. The students were also inspired by “Pay it Forward,” a 2000 movie starring Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacey, and Haley Joel Osment in which a child performs good deeds or his fellow citizens and starts a new social awareness movement.
The idea of “Pay It Forward” is that a person who is a recipent of a good deed doesn’t pay back the person doing them the favor, but instead pays it forward by performing a good deed for the next person.