Growing up, my mom would constantly tell me that “a penny is a fortune.”

Every time I would accidentally step on some loose change or utter the words, “it’s just a dollar,” I would hear these same five words come out of her mouth.

I never really understood what she meant when I was younger, as a single penny can get you very little in this country. I remember staring at every penny I found and wondering how a “fortune” could just be sitting outside of the CVS in a parking lot.

Pennies were not supposed to be fortunes. Pennies were items used to make wishes in the mall fountain or to flip in the game “Heads or Tails.” I could’ve gone all the way into my adult life not understanding the significance of my mother’s words, but luckily I didn’t have to.

In third grade, I experienced an interaction with a complete stranger that dramatically altered my perception of the value of money. A series of events, along with the generosity of one beautiful soul, allowed me to finally understand my mother’s confusing life lesson. At a young age, my elementary school introduced my friends and I to the concept of charity work. Towards the end of first grade, all students were given a donation packet for the American Heart Association. The American Heart Association is an organization that collects funds from individuals and puts it all together to donate it to heart disease research. The teachers explained to us the process of collecting donations. Our job was to go around the neighborhood and politely ask the people of our town if they had anything they could spare to donate to our cause.

As first graders, none of us seemed to be very interested in the fundraising activity, until they told us about the prizes. The teachers had organized a prize system where a student would win a prize every time they raised a certain amount of money. These five dollar prizes, which we needed to raise hundreds of dollars to get, sent my classmates and I into a frenzy. Each student wanted to see how many prizes they could collect. I remember coming home from school that day and telling my parents all about my plans to collect donations during the rest of the week after school.

I knocked on door after door throughout my neighborhood trying to get people to donate their money for my prize fund. The American Heart Association program came to our school every year, and for at least first and second grade, the entire school was obsessed with collecting prizes with our donation money.

By third grade, the excitement of collecting these prizes started to die down, and only a fraction of the grade went out to collect money. I was still interested in the idea of free toys, so I decided to give it another year.

I hated walking by the homeless on sidewalks as an elementary school kid, but it was something I had to do while exploring different parts of the city trying to collect donations. My dad always advised me to take safety precautions with them: Try to walk on the opposite side of the street, don’t make eye contact, and ignore them if they try to initiate a conversation. I followed these rules out of fright, but also out of disgust, as I was conditioned to believing that homeless people were uncivilized human beings.

This all changed on one cold winter day, as I was walking down the street, knocking on doors for donations. I went inside of this nice-looking restaurant to ask for a donation because I had noticed that it was in these kinds of places where I would receive the most sizable funds for my cause. I asked the man at the front desk if he was able to spare some money, but he simply laughed me off and explained that he wasn’t interested.

Disappointed, I began making my way over to the next house, when I was stopped in my tracks by this random stranger. He was an old man who looked to be in his mid-60s. I couldn’t know for sure, but from his ragged clothes and his malnourished body, he seemed like he didn’t own a home and was living on the streets. I began to feel bursts of adrenaline in my body from all the fear, wondering why this man was trying to talk to me. The old man slowly reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out two dollars. Though he didn’t look like he had much to give, he handed me the money and said, “Take this for your project, okay? Give it to someone who needs it.” I thanked the man but before I could say another word, my dad started calling me from the next house saying that we have to keep going if we were going to make it home by dinner. I watched the man walk away and never forgot the amazing act of kindness he had done for me.

My interaction with this elder opened up my eyes to see the value in my mother’s words, as she was once close to a similar situation. While I grew up in a financially stable household, my mother wasn’t as fortunate. By the time she was my age, she was attending an underfunded high school, living in poverty, and waking up at 4am every morning to work a minimum wage job to support her family. She always believed that a penny was a fortune because, to her, it really was. Every penny she earned from working her job was precious, as her (and my) family needed it for food and shelter at the time. Her message was what made my encounter with the man so memorable.

For him, those two dollars looked as if they were his biggest fortune. No matter how disadvantaged he was at the time, he still put his own personal needs aside to give to a good cause.

The next year, basically everyone was done with the American Heart Association because at that point the prizes didn’t matter so much. The class realized that simply buying them for a cheaper price was much easier. I would’ve followed my friends and given up on the project if it were not for that kind old man.

I realized that instead of thinking about my personal gain, I should be doing what I can to help those who are seriously in need. I continued to raise money for the American Heart Association for as long as I was enrolled in that school system. It came to a point where I was the only person in my class who was still knocking on doors for donations, but it didn’t matter to me. Like the man from the street had taught me, even if it doesn’t benefit us personally, we should always lend a hand to those who need it.

He likely doesn’t even remember this incident and I still think about it all the time. That man prompted me to go on and raise thousands of more dollars for the American Heart Association with his simple two-dollar donation. It just goes to show that the smallest kind gestures can make a world of difference in our community.