学进去

Thousands of encouraging roadside signs have been planted around the world, and it’s all thanks to one woman who felt helpless in the face of mental illness.

Amy Wolff was first encouraged to start planting the encouraging signs after she had a heartbreaking discussion with a friend in May 2017. “We were hanging out with friends when one of them mentioned the growing number of people trying to kill themselves in our community,” says Wolff. “I wasn’t a doctor. I didn’t know of anyone suffering from thoughts of self-harm. What could I do?”

Then Wolff got the idea to start planting encouraging signs in people’s yards. For the following two weeks, she and her kids started knocking on people’s doors across their town of Newburg, Oregon and asking if they could put up signs with messages like “Don’t Give Up” and “Your Mistakes Don’t Define You”.

Wolff then started receiving messages from other people in the community wanting to buy the signs. Within a few days, Wolff had sold over 150 of the yard signs. That night, Wolff’s husband created a website to sell the signs.

“Within a year, we had news media in Dallas, Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland cover our movement,” she added. By the fall of 2018, Wolff set up the Don’t Give Up organization for her signs. Since she planted her first sign two years ago, she has shipped the organizations messages of encouragement to all 50 US states and 26 countries in 6 languages.

With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, the messages that Wolff has received from sign owners are meaningful. One message from Frank reads: “I just had a woman knock on my door. She began to cry and thank me for the signs in my yard. Her son had tried to kill himself and these signs were in the yard the day they came home from the hospital.”