Golda Och Academy’s Lower School kicks off the Moore Love program with founder Betsy Stephens.
WEST ORANGE, NJ — On Friday, Nov. 3, Golda Och Academy’s Lower School kicked off Moore Love’s Pass It On program with founder Betsy Stephens. The program, which started in 2014 at Gregory Elementary School in West Orange, was created in memory of Stephens’ sister with the belief that one small act of kindness can be passed on and on until it has made a difference in the world. Last year, West Orange Superintendent of Schools Jeff Rutzky approached Moore Love to make the program districtwide and this year Golda Och Academy has joined all West Orange schools in the program to support Moore Love’s initiative.
“My sister made kindness her focus and showed me over and over again how a smile or kind word could turn a difficult situation around and how one kind act could change the trajectory of someone’s day and even start a contagion of many more kind acts,” Stephens said in a press release. “After she passed away, I wanted other people to learn what my sister taught me. That’s when Moore Love and the Pass It On program were born. Now kindness pours out of schools throughout West Orange and travels as far as Hawaii and India.”
Through the program, each student is given a Moore Love card with a unique number and is encouraged to do an act of kindness for someone else. Once they perform a kind deed, they log it onto www.moore-love.org and pass their card on to the recipient. The recipient is then asked to perform another kind deed for someone else and log it on the website using the same number. The hope is that each recipient logs in acts of kindness on the website so students can see how far their one act has traveled.
“Golda Och Academy is excited to join in with other West Orange schools as the Moore Love project certainly reinforces what is at the heart of our school’s mission,” Lower School Principal Carrie Z. Siegel said in the release. “It reaffirms the value of kindness, which is fundamental to the type of human beings we want our children to become.”
As a special bonus, students who have logged their kind deed on the website are given a wristband to present to local businesses through Dec. 3 to redeem various rewards. Businesses supporting the Moore Love program at Golda Och Academy are Bagels Supreme, Cait & Abby’s Bakery, Carvel, Charmed Beading Studio, Chocolate Works, Doin’ Dishes, Dunkin’ Donuts, Eagle Rock Lanes, Frozen in Time, Jerusalem Pizza, LikeWear, Livingston Camera, Meyers Toy Store, MODstudio, Sparkhouse Toys, Supreme Bakery and West Orange Bake Shop.
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