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'Pay It Forward' runner-up goes on shopping spree to help others
BY JAMES LOEWENSTEIN
STAFF WRITER
06/25/2008
The Daily & Sunday Review and Gannon Associates have presented a $250 check to Pay-It-Forward runner-up Lisa Para of North Rome so that she could go on a shopping spree.
Except that Para didn’t use the money to buy things for herself.
Instead, she spent the money buying powdered Gatorade, snacks, phone cards, and other items for U.S. troops overseas.
“I had so much fun” on the shopping spree, said Para, who added that she is “pretty frugal” when buying things for herself. She bought almost all the items at the Creekside Grocery, a store in North Rome, which she said “offers great prices” because it wants to help people in the community. But because the Creekside Grocery didn’t carry phone cards, she bought them at a Dollar General.
Para said she plans to bring the items -- probably on Thursday -- to a Canton business called The Works @ Jana’s, which has been collecting goods to send as care packages to soldiers overseas.
Para received the $250 because she was the readers’ top choice in the Pay it Forward campaign, which was sponsored by The Daily Review and Gannon Associates.
Pay it Forward was a campaign to publicize and support acts of kindness. The concept was that if someone pays you a good deed, don’t pay it back — pay it forward by helping someone else.
The campaign offered a $1,000 cash award to the person who submitted the most innovative idea for helping others, with the money to be used to pay for carrying out the good deed.
Some 50 people submitted entries in the campaign, stating how they would use the $1,000 award to help others.
Earlier this month, two panels of judges from The Review and Gannon Associates, deliberated, taking into account a reader poll, and awarded the $1,000 prize to Ellen and Joe Foust of Granville Summit. They have been using the money to assist an area family beset with financial and medical problems.
The Fousts’ idea, while not the top vote-getter in the reader poll published in The Review, was determined by the judges to be the most uniquely local act of kindness. The final judging was based on the readers’ top choice counting as one vote, The Review panel of judges’ choice as one vote and Gannon Associates panel of judges’ top choice as one vote. The Fousts’ idea won two out of those three votes.
Unexpectedly, The Review and Gannon Associates also decided to give a $250 award to Para, who was the readers’ top choice, based on an on-line poll.
George V. Lynett Jr., publisher of The Review, said: “We didn’t plan on giving out a second award for the Pay It Forward campaign; but the judging panels at both The Review and Gannon Associates felt very strongly that Lisa Para’s idea to send care packages to troops serving overseas should be supported. The judges also felt that the reader vote for Lisa’s idea was so high that it could not be overlooked. Therefore, we decided to commit another $250 to the campaign to support Lisa’s great idea to Pay It Forward.”
Mark Gannon, chief operating officer of Gannon Associates, said he hoped that presenting the two cash awards would motivate readers to help fund some of the ideas for helping others that were published in The Review as part of the Pay it Forward campaign.
“They are all great causes,” said Gannon, who added that it was tough to pick a winner.
Para said Monday that she has spent $210 of the $250 on items for the troops, and will be giving the remaining $40 to The Works @ Jana’s to help pay the postage and shipping costs of sending items to the troops.
James Loewenstein can be reached at (570) 265-1633; or e-mail: jloewenstein@thedailyreview.com.
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