“I promise I’ll start my homework after this episode of ‘Stranger Things.’”
It’s not uncommon to make a promise in day-to-day life, but what happens when there’s no follow through?
After his father died in 2012, founder of “because i said i would,” Alex Sheen, created the non-profit organization as a way to make promises a more serious commitment.
“I was not good with my promises before my father died, and it shames me to believe that he may never see the man that I have become and that’s one of the things that comes with being a person that doesn’t follow through,” Sheen said.
In order to add meaning to promises, Sheen, who spoke Monday in Pruis Hall, created promise cards to help hold people accountable to their promises.
“We say over 15,000 words a day as Americans, and we forget a lot of those, a lot of them don’t have meaning,” Sheen said. “It seems they escape us pretty quickly, so I wanted just a way to give it to somebody and say ‘You know, I’m going to do this.’”
Since 2012, the organization has sent over 8 million cards to over 153 countries — by request only.
Sheen has completed promises as simple as returning a friend’s sweatshirt to walking 245 miles across Ohio in 10 days to raise money for three Cleveland women who were held captive for 10 years.
“I sometimes say to myself, ‘A promise pulls you through,’” Sheen said. “So what that means to me is there’s so many uncomfortable moments where you’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to do this anymore’ and if you’re not a person of your word, like I was, then you just quit, and all the experiences that are just over that wall, you never have.”
While the non-profit was created to honor Sheen’s late father, co-founder Amanda Messer had a personal connection to the cause because of her father — who never kept his promises.
However, Messer wasn't involved since day one, she started by working with Sheen and promise cards, until about a month after Sheen founded the organization.
“I think it was maybe a month or something before Alex actually let me help him. He was sort of saying, ‘No, I got this on my own,’” Messer said. “You know nobody really knew where it was going to go either so he felt like he had to do this in honor of his dad, he had to do this on his own.”
In order to keep fulfilling promises, "because i said i would" began local chapters to help others make their promises more of a commitment.
In January, "because i said i would" will start a pilot high school chapter in order to continue their mission of keeping promises to help others in need. If the pilot is successful, high schools across the U.S. will be able to start their own chapter.
Contact Mary Freda with comments at mafreda@bsu.edu or on Twitter at @Mary_Freda1.
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