Viral Peptoc hotline for Healdsburg students inspires motivational book

A hotline project for a Healdsburg school that went viral after it was launched two years ago is still receiving calls today and inspired a book published last month.

Jessica Martin, an art teacher at West Side Unified Elementary School in Healdsburg, along with guest artist Asherah Weiss, led students in launching the PepToc Hotline in 2022.

According to Martin, the hotline has sent more than 17 million messages of hope and encouragement by June 2024. The recorded messages and advice from students range from “Cheer up” to “Try a round on the trampoline.”

A poster project created in collaboration with the hotline was expanded to include motivational artwork created by young people from 25 counties and across the United States.

In early 2023, Martin and Weiss launched a call on the PepToc website for children around the world to create posters with encouraging words and drawings for their community.

After contacting a book agent, Martin and Weiss turned many of these posters into a book called You Are Amazing Like A Rocket, published by Andrews McMeel and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

The book includes 50 posters, as well as eight tear-out posters made by West Side Elementary students for readers to hang in their community. The book's title and cover were invented and designed by a West Side fifth-grader, Martin said.

Martin said writing the motivational book, which retails for $24.99, has been “the most incredible experience,” and she hopes it will inspire readers in the same way the hotline brings joy to listeners.

“Thanks to the success of the hotline, so many people reached out and asked, 'We want to get involved in this, how can we bring this into our classrooms, our libraries, our community groups?'” Martin told The Press Democrat. “Setting up a hotline is complicated and can be very expensive if it's successful, but the other part of this project, which is these posters, is easy to do.”

The hotline, which still receives 10,000 calls a day from around the world, was born out of a “desire to help our community during a difficult time,” Martin said, citing two years of COVID-related isolation, wildfires and the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

At the time, Martin expected a few grandparents to call. Instead, Martin says, the project and its heartwarming story went viral after columnist Kerry Benefield published an article in the Press Democrat.

In an August commentary for Time magazine, Martin reflected on the lessons learned.

In her article for Time, Martin wrote that two days after its creation, the hotline was receiving 60,000 calls per hour, resulting in a phone bill of $45,000.

She found a sponsor and a company that would cover the call volume and costs, and changed the number “so that an incredibly patient man named Tim in North Carolina would no longer receive thousands of calls a day from people dialing the wrong hotline,” Martin wrote.

Martin also wrote that the project had provided insights into the positive power of art, the importance of listening to children and the “basic need for connection.”

“As an artist, I see the impact that creativity has on everyday life,” Martin told The Press Democrat. “I think as a culture we don't focus on that.”

Martin also said that the project highlights not only creativity but also students’ strengths.

“I've seen children who have been through tremendous hardship,” Martin said. “Their resilience and the steadfastness of their joy is something that needs to remind us all that we all still carry that inside of us.”

Martin and Weiss are in the process of starting a nonprofit organization to show other schools and groups how they can run projects similar to PepToc in their community.

“We hope to create an organization that encourages people to follow their impulses, no matter how simple or humble they may be, because you never know what impact it can have,” she said.