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Brunch Session

A promise made should be a promise kept

Kentucky School Advocate

March 2018

By Matt McCarty
Staff writer

Alex Sheen, founder of the nonprofit “because I said I would” social movement, closed the KSBA Annual Conference Brunch Session with some advice for what attendees could write on a promise card:

“Maybe start with something small. Don’t (promise to) walk across Kentucky, that’s a stupid idea.”

Sheen speaks from experience. He once famously walked across the state of Ohio in 10 days as a promise to honor three women who survived being kidnapped for 10 years.

“For about 95 percent of the time, I walked by myself,” Sheen said. “I guess the point is that promises can get lonely sometimes. Think about your position. Maybe sometimes you want to do something for the community and so you make this commitment and you'd hope your friends, family members, colleagues, somebody would show up. But should that day come along and nobody else shows, you just can't care that much because that's not how a promise works. Sometimes in this life we've got to go alone to do what we believe in.”

Sheen’s “because I said I would” movement began on Sept. 4, 2012, the day his father, Al, died of cancer. Sheen described his father as an average, normal man except for one thing: “My father was a man of his word. When he said he was going to be there for you, he showed up. My father was far from a perfect person, but he kept his promises.

“When it comes to keeping promises, well, it seems like a lot of people in this life don’t do that anymore.”

Sheen delivered his father’s eulogy and he spoke about the importance of a promise. That day was the first time Sheen would hand out a promise card.

“You write a promise on that card. You go to the person you're making that commitment to, and you tell them, ‘I'm going to fulfill this promise and when I do, I earn that card back. The card is a symbol of my honor, my respect; it is my property, and I'm coming back for it.’ You go and you fulfil your promise, you come back to that person, you earn your card back. You keep it as a reminder that perhaps you are a person of your word, like Al Sheen was to his sons.”

That same day, Sheen posted online that he would mail 10 promise cards to anybody, anywhere in the world, at no cost to anyone. The response was more than Sheen could’ve imagined.

“Since the day my father left, we have distributed over 4.47 million promise cards to over 153 countries around the world, and by request only,” he said.

Promise cards were passed out to board members and superintendents near the end of Sheen’s speech. While he wouldn’t recommend walking across the Commonwealth, he did have a suggestion.

“The role of education in our society, the impact it has on our future is undervalued wildly,” he said. “Your work, it is important, it is needed. I have shaken the hands of these children who are counting on you to make a difference in their community, to build a structure of support for them.

“Your commitment to your communities and to education is maybe what needs to be written on that card. And as you contemplate what your promise might be in your personal life or otherwise, I'll ask you to remember one last quote. It’s from a guy named George Bell. … ‘You can pretend to care, but you can't pretend to show up.’”

Sheen quit his job at a software company after an affirming letter from a young girl battling depression gave him the courage to quit. He is now “all in” with his nonprofit.

Some of Sheen’s promises included volunteering for one week each at 52 nonprofits and delivering 100 Disneyland tickets to sick children in Nevada.

“A lot of times the small things that we say in life, they don't mean much to us and maybe we forget about them, but perhaps what we're forgetting the most is those words, they might mean the earth to that other person,” Sheen said.

His message is simple: There are good people in this world but sometimes they lose sight of accountability.

“I'm all for miracles, but sometimes what we've got to remember is the world, what it will always need, are for people to just do what they said they were going to do in the first place,” Sheen said.

“As nonprofit organizations we try to find solutions to the world's problems and, across sections of the social sector, I don't care if it's homelessness or the environment, whatever it might be, we've seen there is a common solution among many of these challenges, and that is education,” he said. “It is incredibly important that we teach our children reading, writing, math, science, that is all incredibly important. But if we do not teach our children how to be decent human beings to one another, tell me what the point of society is at all.”

His nonprofit promotes character education to help children learn and practice concepts – including honesty, self-control and accountability – by making available resources, lesson plans and videos to teachers.

“While I'm incredibly proud of our work in schools with character education, I believe to let this remain simply as a message is not true leadership,” Sheen said.

“As leaders we must take specific time to develop personally, to build strength. That's why we go to school, that’s why we go to college, that's why we spend time in leadership sessions. My question to you is, after we have spent our entire lives building this kind of strength, what is it that we even do with it? I believe we must use it to help others in need, to make that promise and keep it. That is what these five words mean to me.”