Woman Dedicated Herself To 365 Good Deeds

At a time where people are deciding on a New Year’s Resolution, perhaps you should consider the efforts of one woman and pay it forward.

For every day in 2011, 48-year-old journalist and author Judith O’ Reilly performed a charitable deed. She collected trash, made tea, tidied graves, babysat, and cleared dead rodents, and she even convinced a millionaire to amass donations for the homeless. She championed for cancer patients, taught mentally disabled children, and collected thousands in spare change in a jam-jar to donate to charity.

The goal of her good-deed vow was intended to make her feel like a better person. She’d witnessed all the saintly acts her parents and other people had done and wanted 2011 to be the year of her doing something worthy for her fellow man.

The Daily Mail explains that O’ Reilly chronicled her activities in A Year of Doing Good: One Woman, One New Year’s Resolution, 365 Good Deeds (ISBN-13: 978-0670921133).

Each chapter is dedicated to a resolution. The epilogue expounds:

“I didn’t realize when I made the resolution that New Year what I was taking on. I’d made resolutions before… but the idea of doing one good deed a day morphed into something else again. This year made me question what a good life is, how we give our lives meaning, and what it is to love. It also taught me that people don’t always want the good you want to do, and that doing good – believe you me – is harder than it looks.’

O’ Reilly previously published two other novels, bestseller Wife in the North and Living in a Drawer. She is married with three children and is from Alnwick, Northumberland.