On a cold Tuesday afternoon, about a dozen middle school girls and their mentor, Cheryl Kreider of Lancaster, walked the streets of downtown Lancaster with a mission to share their Wave of Kindness with others.

Kreider and the Reynolds Middle School students were distributing letters to strangers requesting they "pay it forward" and do a random act of kindness for someone and pass on the letter. The letters each contained gifts for the recipients that ranged from donated gift cards to a bowtie from Mayor Richard Gray. The goal of the community service project is to distribute 26 letters. The students are hoping for each of the letters to be distributed to 26 more people with gifts.

"If all 26 recipients pay it forward and the wave is not broken, 676 people will have been blessed by our kindness," the letter says.

The project is also a way for Kreider to carry on the legacy of her daughter, Shana Rae Hernandez, who died in 2006 from complications of Type 1 diabetes at age 33. Kreider has since launched Team Shana, a nonprofit foundation that strives to share Shana's desire to help children, Kreider says.

According to the foundation's website, www.teamshana.org, the foundation was formed to promote the values she felt were important for all children to learn. These include:

Respect is something you give freely to others and earn for yourself.

Appreciate life with all its hardships. There is always someone with a heavier burden and a more difficult situation than your own.

Education is a gift. Everyone learns differently. Work to your full potential and ask for help when you need it.

Kreider has been working with the students after school since October and used the exercise as a way to end the program with a life lesson.

As Kreider and the girls distributed the letters along North Prince and North Queen streets, they took turns approaching people passing by, even stopping people in cars in a convenience store parking lot.

Odessa Stewart, a sixth-grade student at the school, says that the project was important to her because "we can teach other people how to care more about each other."

Odessa also hopes that more people "will do these kind of projects and pass kindness on."

Julie Rhoads, community school director at Reynolds Middle School, says the after-school group has been busy with different projects that serve the community and the environment. One of the recent projects included refurbishing old chairs by covering them with comic strips. The chairs will be used in the future Zoetropolis movie theater in downtown Lancaster, Rhoads says.