A Red Deer girl used her seed money to decorate pencils and sold them in her school, raising cash for the Red Deer & District SPCA.

Tracy from Rimbey used her $10 to sponsor a head-shave for the Terry Fox Foundation.

Nicole, a single mother from Sylvan Lake received a $100 gift certificate toward a Nintendo DS for her daughter.

“Thank you so very much to the person that did this. Know that you really, really did make be feel so happy and lucky to be on the receiving end of this feel-good gesture. I can’t wait to pass it on!” she wrote in the blog on Servus Credit Union’s Feel Good Ripple website.

Kicked off on Oct. 15 in the credit union’s 100-plus branches across Alberta, the Feel Good Ripple campaign has handed out $200,000 in ten-dollar bills, with the proviso that the money be used to put a smile on someone else’s face.

Leading up to the Oct. 15 campaign, schoolchildren were given seed money to to create projects for the charities of their choice.

Another $5,000 has been set aside for a draw to be made on Dec. 1, with the 10 winners each to receive a $500 donation to the charity of their choice. Half the names will drawn from among the bloggers and the rest will be drawn from among the people who have written down their experiences in the books provided at Servus branches.

All 20,000 bills and the cards that went with them were given out within two weeks from the Oct. 15 kickoff, said Stephen Brosinsky, Red Deer regional manager for Servus.

There’s no way to measure the ripple of good will those 20,000 bills continue to generate, $10 at a time, Brosinsky said on Tuesday.

“It’s been a phenomenal success . . . and it’s been continuing. It’s amazing, the stories. Many of them have said, how can you stop at $10? A lot of them have (added) their own money or they’ve taken that $10, bought supplies, put their energies, efforts and love into creating (for example) a little bell for attaching to the dog collars . . . and the money he’s raising goes back to the SPCA in Red Deer.

Branches of the SPCA are among the big winners in the campaign.

Heidi Arbeau-Wood, development officer for the Red Deer & District SPCA said people in her organization had no idea that it would reap the rewards of the Servus campaign.

“It’s kind of been a surprise campaign for us, and one in which we did not need to do any work. It’s been fantastic. We weren’t even aware of this campaign until the first child came in.”

Pam Perry, who teaches Grade 6 at Eastview Middle School, said her homeroom class came up with the idea to donate money to the SPCA as part of their social studies unit.

Perry had approached the class, asking how they would like her to spend the $10 she had received from Servus.

The students brainstormed from a list of 50 potential suggestions for how the money could be put to the best use.

That they chose the SPCA is no surprise, because children that age have a special connection with animals, said Perry. She matched the money from Servus with another $10 of her own, bringing the total to $20.

Arbeau-Wood said she has no idea how much of the money she is currently receiving from children was a result of the Servus campaign.

Information about Feel Good Ripple is available from Servus branches or online at www.feelgoodripple.ca

bkossowan@reddeeradvocate.com