We Made a Hotline With Some Elementary Students to Help People Having a Hard Day. Seventeen Million Calls Later, Here’s What We’ve Learned

I knew something big was coming when my credit card was charged $45,000 overnight. No, it was not a scam. It was the phone bill for a hotline I made with a group of elementary school kids. We were getting 60,000 calls an hour.

The adventure began on a spring day in 2022, at West Side Elementary, our local public school in rural Healdsburg, California. I spent the day there with Asherah Weiss, my creative partner for a project on compassion and acts of kindness. We asked the students, “What’s something you could do or say for someone who is having a hard day?” A sea of hands immediately shot up into the air. These kids had just navigated two years of the COVID pandemic and made it through wildfire evacuations— they had an endless treasure trove of wise and hilarious advice. Some responses: “Go scream outside.” “I trust that you can make things right.” “If you are nervous, go get your wallet and buy ice cream and shoes.”

Asherah then worked with the students to make posters with their encouraging messages, while I recorded their improvised pep talks for a hotline I was building for our community. We copied the posters on brightly colored paper and hung them up around our little town. We called the project “Peptoc,” inspired by my 7-year-old son’s spelling of the words when he helped make our logo.

Two days after launching the hotline, I was billed for $45,000 in hotline fees. We had received over a million calls from all over the world after someone had posted the hotline number on social media. Press flooded the school, and letters came rolling in from nurses, fellow students, cancer patients, and even people saying it had saved their lives.

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The following days were a mad dash: I miraculously found a sponsor for the hotline, transferred the line over to a new company that could handle our volume of calls, and changed the number so an incredibly patient man named Tim in North Carolina would stop receiving thousands of calls a day from people mis-dialing the hotline (his was one number off)—all while fielding incessant calls from television stations, radio programs, and newspapers. To my complete astonishment, this small community project had swept around the globe.

Two years later, the Peptoc hotline has received over 17 million calls, and continues to get spikes of hundreds of thousands of calls in one day. It has become a tool to bring joy into difficult times and has even been adopted by some hospitals as part of their mental health programs. In response to all the requests to join the movement, we expanded the Peptoc poster project, and ended up working with students from 25 countries and across the U.S.

So, what can one glean from the overwhelming success of this project?

Young people are one of our greatest sources of joy and transformation. They are powerful leaders. They carry the radical hope and imagination we all need to see new, positive paths forward. If we listen, they can teach us— in the words of Kristina, a young Ukrainian woman who we had the fortune to work with— “how to be humans to each other.”

We have a fundamental need for connection— to others, to ourselves, and to the physical world around us. We are in a collective state of overwhelm, and the words of these kids are a reminder for us to take a moment to find that wisdom, humor, and state of wonder within us.

Positive change for the world can be easy. The division and desperation we see each day through the media and in our lives can leave us paralyzed. One kind word—especially when it comes from the strong joy that children can carry—is a powerful healer and uniter.

I invite you to share a kind word with someone today. You never know how far it will soar.

Jessica Martin is an artist and educator. With Asherah Weiss, Martin is the author of You Are Amazing Like A Rocket. Need some encouragement today? Give the Peptoc Hotline a call at 707-873-7862 to hear pre-recorded messages from kids.