On a recent flight from Los Angeles to London, I turned 75 over Greenland. The flight attendants sang me “Happy Birthday,” with a few passengers waking up to join in, and handed me a cupcake with a pretend candle on top. 

Seventy-five is a milestone birthday. It’s the juncture when you realize that even if your parents lived well into their nineties, you probably have at most 20 years left on this earth. 

Courtesy

Peter Samuelson

Last year, I wrote the book Finding Happy: A User’s Guide to Your Life with Lessons from Mine (Simon & Schuster/Regalo), based on my mentoring of hundreds of teenage foster kids through my First Star nonprofit. At our 15 university sites across the country, we house, educate and encourage high school-aged foster youth, achieving the remarkable transition where 82% go on to colleges and universities. I called the book Finding Happy because, in the end, I think that is what all of us are trying to achieve. 

The revelation for me is that I find my own happy, to a considerable extent, through my nonprofit work. It is where I meet the best people, and where my sense of legacy is delivered through lifting up the lives of others.

The toolkit of a film producer turns out to transfer directly to creating new charities to address old challenges. First, you have to be able to tell the story of something that doesn’t yet exist, whether it’s a film or a cause. The seven nonprofits that I’ve had the privilege of founding all started with the ability to tell the story. It is with oral narrative that you get a film financed, crewed, cast, and distributed, just as it is how you raise the money and assemble the team for a new nonprofit. Storytelling in both arenas is how you build empathy, inspire people, and motivate them to join you in making a difference.  

The management book that had the greatest single influence on me is Servant Leadership by Bob Greenleaf and Peter Drucker. Director of management research at AT&T, Greenleaf also ran the Bell System Advanced Management School in Ashbury, N.J., and Drucker was a guest speaker and educator in the 1950s and ’60s. They created a management system characterized by leading from the middle, empowering others, listening a lot and taking and praising good ideas regardless of their origin. I’ve tried to do that in leading films, commercial endeavors and my seven nonprofits. 

Being a film producer teaches us how to take good risks, without which no one would ever dare to make a film. It turns out that that is the same assessment as whether it is worth devoting several years of one’s life to a nonprofit. 

I founded the Starlight Children’s Foundation in 1983 after we brought one seriously ill child from London to Los Angeles because he wanted to see Disneyland before he died. Producers are skilled at calling a meeting and crewing it: I stood at the end of a table, described what we had done for little Sean, and asked if maybe we could do it a few times a year. That became the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which in Australia, Canada, the United States and the UK has raised and deployed since $1.3 billion through eight psychosocial services to make seriously ill children, their parents and their siblings happy. We didn’t know it then — because psychoneuroimmunology had not been invented yet — but research has since found that if you make a child who is ill happier it can positively impact their immune system, healing and resilience to pain.

I’m focused now on ROKindness.org, where I serve as volunteer CEO. This is an online platform, available as an app for Apple and Android devices, to recognize, encourage, reward, and show graphically how ripples of kindness inspire further ripples on the pond of life, uniting us in a web of kindness so sorely needed in a time when hatred has been on the ascent. 

As a Jew and a proud Zionist, I have had to grapple with the awfulness of Gaza, war, settler violence and the absolute imperative and ethical right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. I founded People4Peace.net to push back on the lies pushed by the descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood against the State of Israel, including the whole nonsense of apartheid. Yet I also believe that indiscriminate, sadistic violence of Hamas should not excuse dropping unguided bombs on civilians, even if militant terrorists are hiding behind and under them. We have to be better than that. 

My Judaism begins with tikkun olam and tzedakah. I try to live in Maimonides’ pyramid of generosity, and ROKindness.org is my attempt to build it in three dimensions in a way that is viral and can stand up robustly against the ascendant hate that is spawned by a bunch of nonsense online and now by AI bots. 

Yes, the Jews have a right to a homeland. Yes, the Palestinians have a right to work towards a two-state solution. And yes, we all have to do better and find some kindness on that field of death. Camp David came close; the Oslo Accords came close. We need new leadership in Israel and the United States and a new approach to a two-state solution. In the meantime, we must push back on the antisemitic lies that flood our Gen Z young adults and cause them to revile Israel based on negative propaganda devoid of truth. 

One American was incredibly kind to me while I was working as his interpreter on a film about the Monte Carlo Rally. In 1973, Tony Busching invited me into a job at his studio in Los Angeles, offering me a visa, a salary, and even suggesting I could use his family’s guest room and borrow their spare car until I got on my feet. I did all those things and have been here ever since. Working across the United States as a film producer in perhaps forty different states, I know that virtually every American I worked with was kind. 

Sitting here days after the blue tsunami — realizing that Georgia has sent a female Black Senator to Washington, that Mississippi has voted blue, and that Texas has rejected the awfulness of the last several years and is attempting to install a new team with a new agenda to do better — I am renewed and relieved in my affection for America and for Americans. I knew we were better than what went before, but now we have some actual proof, as well as the tools to remake our democracy. 

I hope and pray by everything I hold dear that this is a new beginning for all of us, where we prize our common humanity and put it to the forefront. There is much more that unites us than separates us, and voices for kindness and humanity need to stand up against the racism, division, tribalism and alternate realities that have no place in our civilization. Let’s do better. Hinenei, and kol hakavod. 

Peter Samuelson is a veteran film producer behind more than two dozen feature films, including cult classics like “Revenge of the Nerds” and “Arlington Road.” He is also a philanthropist and social entrepreneur who has spent decades using storytelling and innovation to change lives.