Feed The Deed took place when sophomore Dalya Lerner (left)and her friends offered free rides, including one to a woman who signed her name as Vanessa Frontz (right).
Riding around the campus with a couple of friends one cold Tuesday, watching fellow university students run to classes, sophomore hearing and speech sciences major Dalya Lerner stuck her head out the window of her friend’s car and called to a woman hurrying on the side of the road.
“Do you need a ride?” she asked.
Lerner and the woman had never met before; as far as either was concerned, the other was just another face in a university of thousands.
But as the woman, who said she was a student, explained to Lerner and her friends, she had been sprinting to Comcast Center, where her car was parked and in danger of being towed. In her desperation, she gratefully accepted the ride.
Lerner’s motivation to perform her act of kindness for a stranger was an initiative called Feed The Deed, a goodwill movement that has been sweeping college campuses in North America over the past month.
Started in early February by Josh Stern, a University of Ottawa medical student, Feed The Deed encourages people to perform acts of kindness for someone else, whether strangers or friends. The “feeder” of the deed then posts a video or photo on Facebook and nominates a short list of friends to carry out similar acts of kindness.
“What this is doing is it’s inspiring people to get out and do these acts of kindness that they wouldn’t normally do in their daily lives, and hopefully by doing that, we can encourage them to bring this to a part of their daily lives,” Stern said.
Lerner, along with a couple of friends, spent an hour and a half of her day offering free rides to people on the campus after being nominated on Facebook by a friend from Canada.
“Before I was even nominated, I was telling people here about Feed The Deed, and no one had heard of it,” she said. “Now a lot of people have done it, but when I did it, not a lot of people knew what it was yet.”
Stern started Feed The Deed to combat the negative effects of Neknominations, a dangerous global drinking game thought to have started in Australia, according to CNN. Neknominations prompt people to record themselves binge-drinking alcohol and post the video online, along with their choices for other nominees who are told to do the same.
But the drinking game can be fatal: It has been linked to at least five deaths of men younger than 30, CNN and other news sources reported.
“I saw Neknomination was really coming into my circle of friends in Toronto and Ottawa,” Stern said. “There’s no positive that can come from that.”
After a few weeks of watching the risky game spread around the world, Stern said, he found a unique Neknomination video posted on YouTube by a South African man. Instead of drinking alcohol, the man in the video gave food to a homeless person on the street.
Emboldened by the video, Stern filmed himself doing his own good deed of delivering free sandwiches to homeless people. He posted the video on Facebook on Feb. 3, called the project Feed The Deed and nominated a few of his friends.
Stern’s friends were onboard almost instantly. Within 10 minutes, he was contacted by his friend Russell Citron, founder of the nonprofit organization Kindness Counts, who wanted to collaborate with Stern on Feed The Deed. The two decided to trademark Feed The Deed to prevent anyone else from using it for financial gain.
“I don’t want anyone making money off of Feed The Deed,” Stern said. “It’s all about charity — it’s all about promoting kindness to the world — so that’s just to ensure that we have the say in the matter and we know it’s going to a good cause.”
With the help of social media and Kindness Counts, Stern’s project quickly spread beyond his friend group. Over the next few weeks, he said, he saw about 10,000 Feed The Deed videos and posts from 20 countries.
As the movement expanded, Feed The Deed participants became increasingly creative with their kindness. Nominees have given gloves or hot drinks to strangers walking in the snow, promoted or donated to charities and baked cookies or written notes for loved ones. Some even decided to give blood for the first time, Stern said.
“Kindness can be anything you interpret it to be,” he said. “If you want to do those personal acts in giving back to someone that inspires you or helping out those less fortunate.”
When senior kinesiology major Fran Berley was nominated, she decided to combine her Feed The Deed with her social justice work. She was helping raise money to provide children in Africa with lifesaving surgeries, and she knew a teacher selling water bottles for the same cause. Berley, a group fitness instructor, bought 10 water bottles to give to students in her step class.
“[They were] very appreciative but confused,” Berley said. “I think people don’t really know how to handle kindness sometimes. They were like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and I explained to them on the mic just what the project is for and about Feed The Deed.”
A few days later, Berley found herself on the receiving end of a Feed The Deed. She’d had little time to make dinner for herself, so a friend who was nominated for Feed The Deed dropped off food at her apartment while she was sleeping.
“It was just very overwhelming,” Berley said. “It was very different to receive it; I got this different perspective. It was like, that is so nice and so shocking and so unnecessary.”