Key Takeaways
- High school English teacher Kristina Ulmer created the $20 Kindness Challenge to honor her younger sister, Katie Amodei, who died in a 2014 car crash.
- Ulmer used about $100 of Amodei’s recovered tip money, added her own funds and turned it into $20 bills that each student had to use for an act of kindness.
- The open‑ended assignment, to do something kind with $20 and report back, has become an ongoing classroom tradition impacting 425 students.
An English teacher in Pennsylvania has turned a deeply personal loss into a growing kindness movement, per ABC News.
High school English teacher Kristina Ulmer lost her younger sister, Katie Amodei, in a car crash in October 2014, just weeks before Amodei’s 30th birthday. Her late sister, who was training to be an EMT and waitressing on the side, had always been drawn to helping people who were struggling.
“She never could understand why we lived in a world where there was so many riches, yet people were lacking,” Ulmer told People earlier this week.
After the crash, police recovered Amodei’s purse from the overturned car. Inside was a wad of about $100 in tip money from her waitressing shift. Ulmer held onto it, knowing she wanted to use it in a way that reflected her sister’s lifelong concern for others.
Four years later, that money became the seed of an experiment in Ulmer’s classroom. While teaching Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” to her 9th-grade English class, inspiration struck: she could give her sister’s money to her class with the instruction to do something kind with it. She immediately added some of her own funds, went to the bank and exchanged the money for stacks of $20 bills — one for each student she taught.
The $20 assignment
In 2018, Ulmer gave every student in her class a crisp $20 bill with a simple but open‑ended assignment: use the money to do something kind for someone else. She explained that the challenge was in honor of her late sister, and told students she hoped they would see how important it is to stay connected to one another and to care for people regardless of differences.
At first, Ulmer imagined that it would be a “one and done” project, but her students quickly proved otherwise. They used their $20 to bake cookies for nursing homes, buy toys for animal charities like Glad Dogs Nation, make bracelets for entire elementary school grades, donate to disease research and surprise strangers with small but meaningful gestures.
Many students added their own money or pooled funds with classmates, then created reflective videos explaining what they did and what they learned.
“A lot of the students express that they didn’t know how easy it was to just do something kind,” Ulmer told People.
From one class to a nonprofit organization
Word of the project spread beyond Ulmer’s classroom in Horsham, Pennsylvania. Right after the first semester of running the challenge, she received an unexpected email from someone who had heard about it and wanted to help fund another round.
More donations followed, eventually totalling more than $7,000 and enabling more than 350 acts of kindness in Amodei’s honor within a few years. Other teachers began reaching out for guidance on how to run the same kind of challenge with their students, and Ulmer started informally coaching them through the process.
In 2025, the $20 Kindness Challenge became an officially recognized nonprofit organization. In Ulmer’s classroom alone, 425 students have participated in the project so far. This spring, Ulmer’s nonprofit will present its first-ever grant to a teacher in New Jersey so she can offer the challenge to her students, too.
Ulmer told People that she imagines Amodei’s reaction to the challenge. “I think she’d be really proud,” she said.
Key Takeaways
- High school English teacher Kristina Ulmer created the $20 Kindness Challenge to honor her younger sister, Katie Amodei, who died in a 2014 car crash.
- Ulmer used about $100 of Amodei’s recovered tip money, added her own funds and turned it into $20 bills that each student had to use for an act of kindness.
- The open‑ended assignment, to do something kind with $20 and report back, has become an ongoing classroom tradition impacting 425 students.
An English teacher in Pennsylvania has turned a deeply personal loss into a growing kindness movement, per ABC News.
High school English teacher Kristina Ulmer lost her younger sister, Katie Amodei, in a car crash in October 2014, just weeks before Amodei’s 30th birthday. Her late sister, who was training to be an EMT and waitressing on the side, had always been drawn to helping people who were struggling.
