You may have heard of the expression “Pay it Forward” or a “Suspended Coffee” in cafes and coffee shops.  If not, pay it forward is a random act of kindness by buying the drink for the person in the queue behind you as well as your own and a suspended coffee is where you pay for an additional drink in advance for someone in need, i.e. a homeless person can ask if there are any suspended coffees, the coffee shop will then give them the drink you paid for earlier.

As I travel a lot with work I often stop at motorway services for a coffee, usually a medium latte. That’s approximately 250 calories, before you consider the fat content in the milk and then there’s the caffeine, it’s not good for me!

I need to stop/reduce this additional coffee intake, so I’m taking this principle of a random act of kindness and changing it slightly – instead of buying someone a drink, I’m going to donate the money I would have spent on a cup of coffee to a charity (£2.50 a week) and drink a glass of water instead.

I normally support the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and have raised £1700 for them by cycling over the years .  I could have just chosen the BHF for this donation and setup a monthly direct debit for £10 each month. However, I want to highlight all the smaller less known charities, ideally heart related, that make a major difference to peoples lives on a significantly smaller budgets.  Therefore, each month I’m going to search for “justgiving cycling heart” or “justgiving running heart” on Twitter and select a tweet at random to give my coffee money to.

My first supporter is Lee Popplewell who is raising money for the Heartbeat of Sport charity, after his brother Paul tweeted the following: –

Considering this was the first tweet in the search results I’m amazed at the similarity to my history – below is an extract from Lee’s story from his JustGiving page: –

After having a Heart Attack while out running at age 37 in October 2012 I became involved with this amazing charity running my first half marathon for them a year later in October 2013.

 I am doing a challenge a month to push myself and to raise money for my chosen charity which is Heart Beat of Sport. 

I don’t want anything in return for this, but perhaps you could “Pay It Forward” and donate your coffee money to either this charity or another smaller charity.  If you do it would be good to know, so please tweet me (@coeurcycliste) to say you have with the name of the charity, supporter and hashtag #DonateYourCoffee

Perhaps the simple action of you sharing this post on Facebook and Twitter will benefit a local charity close to your heart or one of your followers hearts?

Go on click those buttons at the bottom and let’s help those smaller charities raise some much needed funds…  it’s two simple clicks that could make the difference to someone’s life!