Nyla White, left and Cheryl Van Laeken started the Pay It Forward Challenge at Milford School.

Imagine how much better the world would be if every person did one nice thing for another person. If every good deed was repaid by doing another good deed for someone else. A Milford fifth grade student and teacher are trying to do just that with their Pay It Forward Challenge.

Cheryl Van Laeken, a fifth grade teacher at Milford School, shares a news story with her students during each language arts period. “We had a story, about a week ago, about a group of kids in Utah who were paying it forward,” she says. The story inspired fifth grader Nyla White to pay it forward in Milford.

“Nyla came to me and said, ‘I think we should do something like that in fifth grade,” recalls Van Laeken. Van Laeken and White came up with some ideas and ran them by assistant principal Ryan Connor, who thought it was a great concept.

Instructions for the Pay It Forward Challenge

Van Laeken printed up post cards explaining the Pay It Forward Challenge. She also started a blog to record pay it forward stories. White spoke to all of the fifth graders about the project, and all of those students took home a postcard and were challenged to do something nice for someone else.

www.milford5payitforward.blogspot.com went live a week ago. Already stories are coming in from near and far about the good deeds being done thanks to the Pay It Forward Challenge.

“It’s been cool,” says Van Laeken. “The kids are doing things that you wouldn’t expect fifth graders to be doing.”

Recipients of these good deeds, in turn, are paying it forward and sharing their stories on the website. Incredibly, the Pay It Forward Challenge has made its way well outside of the Milford town limits in just a few days.

Last week, a man in Churubusco received a free breakfast and the pay it forward postcard. Later he paid for a stranger’s order at a coffee shop and passed along the postcard. An older couple in Muncie had their leaves raked, and they got the pay it forward postcard.

Postcards are also expected to travel to California, Wisconsin and Washington in the near future, and students are curious to see if their cards eventually make it back to them. The Pay It Forward Challenge could soon be a worldwide phenomenon.