Pros Work With Cons
When she chanced upon a tour of the Texas prison, venture capitalist Catherine Rohr soon discovered a surprising pool of entrepreneurial talent right there in the prison. Chucking her VC job, she started the Prison Entrepreneurship Program that uses Fortune 500-type business executives as volunteer mentors, harnesses the entrepreneurial skills inmates had demonstrated while running the successful... posted on Mar 14 2006, 1,434 reads

My Only Religion
... posted on Mar 08 2006, 551 reads

Applying Technology to a Good Cause
Hamish Fraser, Partners In Health's Director of Informatics and Telemedicine, has earned a new title – "do-gooder." Fraser was one of a half-dozen people singled out by Red Herring magazine in early January for a cover story featuring "Six Who’ve Applied Tech to a Good Cause." ... posted on Mar 01 2006, 1,282 reads

College Summit
J.B. Schramm, 41, saw as a senior at an inner-city Denver high school that many of his friends weren't going on to college -- not for lack of ability, but because no one at home was encouraging them. Ten years ago, he began his mission: Working out of the basement of a housing project in Washington, DC, he gave four underprivileged high-school kids counseling on how to get into college. Since then... posted on Feb 27 2006, 1,120 reads

Elder Wisdom Circle
Have you just about given up on finding the man or woman of your dreams? Have you recently been laid off? Are you 18 years old, uninterested in going to college, and paralyzed by your choices for the future? Or are you just stumped by those black spots on your tangerine trees? Answers to these, and other questions, are just an e-mail away at elderwisdomcircle.org, a pod of 55 senior citizens with ... posted on Feb 23 2006, 1,799 reads

Retail Renunciation
About 50 Bay Area residents have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear. Calling themselves the Compact, the group meets monthly to reaffirm their commitment to the rule, which is to never buy anything new. Compacters can get as much as they want from thrift shops, Craigslist, freecycle.org, eBay and flea markets, as long as the items are s... posted on Feb 22 2006, 1,431 reads

Campaign for Female Education
During a trip to Zimbabwe in 1990, Ann Cotton realized that Africa would never conquer poverty and disease unless its women were educated. She found that families that could not afford to educate all their children would give priority to boys. She knew that educated women were more likely to not contract HIV/AIDS, to marry later, and to have fewer children who were healthier and more likely to go ... posted on Feb 20 2006, 1,226 reads

Barefoot College
Inspired by Gandhi and moved to respond to India’s 1967 famine, Bunker Roy moved from the affluent suburb where he grew up to Rajasthan, India, to help rural villagers improve their lives. The organization he founded in 1972, Social Work and Research Centre, came to be known as “Barefoot College” because its clients are poor, rural, often semiliterate villagers. Communities from all over Ind... posted on Feb 18 2006, 2,775 reads

Olympic Green
Organizers of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, promise that their games will be "the greenest ever." They have vowed to put together a "carbon neutral" event—meaning it will have no net impact on climate change—by investing in forestry, energy efficiency, and other measures to offset carbon dioxide emissions from the event. ... posted on Feb 15 2006, 1,200 reads

No Regrets
Dr. Raed Arini, a Palestinian surgeon in the middle east spends his days and nights calming the living and binding the dead. He is among the good news in the violence that encapsulates the region. When asked about his motivation he simply states, I have to do this," he says, "they are my brothers."
... posted on Feb 14 2006, 2,733 reads