Shannon Leavitt lives in a mobile home with her husband David and their three children (Ashton, 13, Kaden, 10, and Lindsay, 6) and makes $3.35 per hour waiting tables at the Sandpiper restaurant. She’s always taught her children to be altruistic—every day after school, she asks, "What good deeds have you done today?" but she came up with the idea for the cards only seven months ago. “We had just gotten home from the grocery store and Kaden saw an elderly woman taking out the trash,” Leavitt told Yahoo! Shine. “He ran outside and dragged her bag down her driveway. It made me so proud. I wondered, ‘What if we make this into something?'”
The next day, Leavitt and Kaden went to Kinkos and printed 200 business cards. “Kaden carries his cards to school,” said Leavitt. “He’ll hold the door open for students, help teachers roll crates of books down the hallway, and he once helped teach a class.”
Leavitt also gleaned inspiration from her favorite movie, “Pay It Forward” (2000), in which an elementary-school teacher played by Kevin Spacey teaches a young boy named Trevor (Haley Joel Osment) to be charitable to others. Each time Trevor does a good deed, he asks the recipient to "pay it forward."