Puppies Behind Bars
When Gloria Gilbert Stoga quit working for Rudy Guiliani's office, very few folks supported her new venture -- train inmates to raise guide dogs! Prisoners can get unconditional love as they train some of the young puppies, Gloria thought. Turns out, she was right. Today, the program is not only delivering well-loved, well-trained guide dogs, it's also having a positive effect on its inmate pup... posted on Nov 5, 1638 reads

India's First Shelter for Dogs with Disabilities
He is a renowned animal rights activist who holds many key positions in his home state. But nothing defines Mahendra better than his immense, undying love for animals. It was this love that led him to establish India's first home for dogs living with disabilities. Read on to learn how Mahendra's service to these dogs began after a chance encounter with a puppy on the streets of India.... posted on Jan 11, 14668 reads

The Tortoise & The Baby Hippo
It sounds like a fable or a fairy tale. The main characters are an orphaned baby hippopotamus, Owen, and a giant tortoise, Mzee. The hippo was rescued from a massive tsunami, and the tortoise had defied odds and had lived to be 130 years old. But the story of Owen and Mzee is absolutely true. As soon as Owen was released into the park, he immediately took cover with Mzee, and the two have become n... posted on Apr 2, 5485 reads

The Baby Academy
When Dina Abdel Wahab's son Ali was born with Down syndrome, she was unable to find a preschool to meet his needs. Children with Down syndrome do not benefit from environments where they are kept apart from mainstream society. And in Cairo, at the time, Dina had no other options for her son; if a better place was going to exist, she would have to create it herself. Determined to help Ali lead a no... posted on Mar 17, 2002 reads

A Father's Instinct Breathes Life
As he knelt on the bedroom floor, on the phone with 911, something had gone wrong. When your wife is pregnant, no one tells you, "By the way, she might skip labor, suddenly fall to the floor, and give birth. Oh, and the umbilical cord might be tangled around the baby's neck five times." But that's what happened to Josh Levs. In less than 15 minutes, with only instinct and the 911 operator to guide... posted on Feb 23, 4006 reads

Remembering Kindness 41 Years Later
"I was a widow and an expectant mother in the same day. We had bought a new home and I had filled our two bedroom apartment with nursery items in anticipation of moving in. Now the house would be taken away. I knew I would have to go back to my parents' home, at least until I delivered the baby. And the shock of my husband's sudden death had made losing the baby a very real possibility. I moved ba... posted on Nov 5, 6534 reads

Releasing Contracts that Block Joy
"Self-warmth makes everything better: our health, our immune system, our life decisions, our sense of meaning, our capacity for engagement, our effectiveness, and our intimate connections with others. But we may have agreements with ourselves, agreements we don't even know about, to NOT be warm with ourselves. We may have contracts to not like ourselves, to be indifferent, even to hate and be cru... posted on Jan 3, 6905 reads

From Maid to a Bestselling Author
After running away from an abusive marriage, Baby Haldar worked as a maid to support her three children. One of the houses where she would sweep and mop the floor was a professor, who used to give her a book to read. One time, he gave her a notebook and pen. Couple months later, Baby Haldar wrote her life story and today, she's a bestselling author of a Hindi book!... posted on Sep 23, 1742 reads

A Blessing for A Baby Coming Into This World
"Dear, dear tiny being before you are fully human,
remember the ether from which you came.
Hearken to that terrible squeeze
between the womb and the world,
that journey you willed and that willed you.

Then live your wild human time dancing
and grounded in the grand."

Read on for the rest of a lovely poem written by poet gardener, S... posted on Jun 25, 5310 reads

A Maid Becomes an Unlikely Star
Abandoned by her mother at 4, married off at 12 to an abusive husband, a mother herself at 13 -- there is little in Baby Halder’s traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become a famous author. But "A Life Less Ordinary," this season’s publishing sensation in India, is the result of her nighttime writing sessions, squeezed in after her housework duties were finished, when she poured raw... posted on Aug 3, 2461 reads

Babies' Cries Find Technological Comfort
Why do babies cry? Pedro Monagas claims to have the answer in Castellar del Valles, Spain. What started as a way to understand his son's crying, is now "Why Cry" (selling in Spain for 95 Euros) -- a calculator-size device that has a microprocessor that can decipher the broad meaning of a baby's cry with 87 percent accuracy. The gadget listens to a crying baby, considers and calculates for 20 se... posted on Jan 31, 1361 reads

Diary of a Young Naturalist
"This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head. It travels from the west of Northern Ireland in County Fermanagh to the east in County Down. It records the uprooting of a home, a change in county and landscape, and at times the de-rooting of my senses and my mind. I'm Dara, a boy, an acorn. Mum used to call me lon dubh (which is Irish for bl... posted on Jul 16, 1866 reads

Rachel Callander Sees Superpowers
"My first major experience with the healthcare system and with disability was in 2008, when my daughter Evie was born. She had a very rare chromosome condition,and what I noticed after she was born was that the language I was using about her and the language that the doctors were using was very different. And I liked my language better [laughs].Because it highlighted ability and it highlighted hum... posted on Jan 16, 3933 reads

Feeding the Good Wolf: A Gratitude Conversation with Ferial Pear
In an inventive and transformative program for teens, kids not only learn how to nourish and nurture their inherent goodness, they act as secret agents of kindness. Using undercover names like Whip, Neigh Neigh, and G Baby Believe, teens perform anonymous acts of kindness and support others doing the same. Founder Ferial Pearson believes that by doing so, the secret agents "become more ... aware o... posted on May 6, 9159 reads

The Boy Who Saved Seven Lives
It made headlines, and broke hearts worldwide. Highway robbers shot Nicholas Green, a freckle-faced, 7 year-old from California holidaying in Italy. He died two days later. The story might have ended with that tragedy, but his parents Reg and Maggie Green made a very different decision, and one that had a dramatic impact. They donated their son's organs to seven Italians -- among them a mother who... posted on Jul 3, 2068 reads

Spotlight on Seniors Who Are Changing the World
Retirement is a time finally away from bosses and schedules, stress and assignments. Yet, once retired, many miss the sense of purpose and community their jobs provided. Where retirement once called to mind visions of rocking chairs and mid-day snoozes, many in the Baby Boomer generation are shaking things up, turning their focus in retirement to encore careers and volunteerism. In this Spotlight ... posted on Aug 14, 14683 reads

Let's Be Well: A Video Game Born From a Child's Grief
Paula Toledo was the mother of a two-year old, and a two-week-old baby when she lost her husband to mental illness and suicide. In the wake of that devastating loss, "I felt the most important thing I could do was to care for myself and my children. And so I did -- albeit, while I laid in the dirt. Instead of clawing my way out, I decided to surrender and play there with my young children. Insulat... posted on Nov 23, 3861 reads

The Blind Child Musician's Blessing
"Patrick's eyes are not functional. He is in a wheelchair and when we first shook hands, his fingers seemed entirely too thick to be nimble. So when he offered to play the piano for me and his father rolled his wheelchair up to the baby grand, I confess that I thought to myself, "Well, this will be sweet. He has overcome so much. How nice that he can play piano." But then Patrick put his hands to ... posted on Jan 13, 2995 reads

Power of Slow Change
"People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash," points out historian Rebecca Solnit. Yet, meaningful transformations often take time. "You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The t... posted on Jan 28, 1840 reads

The Odd Couple
When the Dec 24th tsunami hit the shores of Kenya and left a baby hippopotamus orphaned, people rushed to its aid and transported it to a nearby wildlife refuge. Exhausted, confused, and frightened, the hippo immediately sought the friendship of Mzee, a 130-year-old tortoise in the park. To everyone’s surprise Mzee returned the affection, and now the pair snuggle and even go for walks together. ... posted on Jul 26, 1803 reads

Imprisoned Men Knit for Kids in Need
In a heartwarming and unusual gesture of generosity, over 30 men who are inmates in an American jail are spending their hours with yarn unraveling at their feet, knitting stocking caps, blankets and booties for children in need around the world. Lavender caps, purple-pompom stockings, hats in stripes and bumble-bee colors -- these prisoners have knitted more than 300 hats this year, about half wit... posted on Dec 3, 1618 reads

The Landlord Who Would Not Evict
September 23rd marked 41 days that the 6-foot, 4-inch tall guy with the tattoo of Jesus on his left arm and the gray ponytail has worked at Walgreens pharmacy on Celanese Road. "The 2-to-10 shift. Proud to do it," says Peirce. He is not your usual landlord. One of Pierce's tenants worked in construction and has a wife and two little kids. A second man worked in utilities contracting and has a baby... posted on Oct 13, 4991 reads

The Woman Who Saved 200 Sloths
"Monique Pool first fell in love with sloths when she took in an orphan from a rescue centre. Since then many sloths have spent time in her home on their way back to the forest -- but even she found it hard to cope when she had to rescue 200 at once. It all began in 2005 when Pool lost her dog, and called the Suriname Animal Protection Society to see if they'd found it. They hadn't, but they told ... posted on Apr 6, 10599 reads

She Lost A Daughter. Today She Shelters 800 Girls
Outside of one home in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh, India), sits a baby's cradle, awaiting another child to be left it its bed to be given a new life. This cradle has taken in hundreds of abandoned and orphaned girls who would otherwise be left on the streets and Sarojini Agarwal, now 80 years old, is the mother to all of them. As a caregiver, educator, companion and mother, Dr Sarojini Agarwal is an i... posted on Mar 17, 18812 reads

Views on a Pandemic
"I write to you now from my home in Seattle, former ground zero of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic, on the fifty-fifth day of our isolation. I write to you nine months pregnant, from the attic bedroom where I fatten on dates meant to hasten the child's arrival, perhaps upon this very bed. It is a rather Victorian confinement, subplot of the quarantine that is pregnancy itself. Friends and acquaintan... posted on May 13, 4214 reads

Rolling For Peace
"Just like a baby rolls on a mother's lap, similarly this man rolls on the streets. So if he can do this, what is it that prevents others from loving each other?" Barreling down a sizzling-hot road, in a cloud of diesel fumes and dust, Ludkan Baba is on a serious roll. LA Times reports that this renunciate has rolled thousands of miles and millions of rounds over the last 19 years, surviving on ... posted on Jun 8, 1130 reads

Endangered Species Chocolate
To put himself through school, Jon Stocking worked on a tuna boat where he witnessed dolphins and other marine animals being fatally trapped in the tuna nets. One day, Jon's conscience got the better of him, as he began to cut open the tuna net to free a trapped mother and baby dolphin and didn't stop till every last fish was freed back to the ocean. Jon lost his job, but not his conscience, and h... posted on Jun 28, 1303 reads

The Swimmer And The Lost Whale
Lynne Cox is a famed open water swimmer and author of the best-selling book "Swimming to Antarctica" -- a chronicle of her swims across the Bering Strait, the English Channel and one mile to the shores of Antarctica. Her new book, "Grayson", is the remarkable story of her experience, at age 17, swimming with a lost baby gray whale off the coast of California. "I think it made me realize the things... posted on Mar 30, 2819 reads

The Time Bank: Better Than Barter
They stand over the table like surgeons, white masks over their noses and mouths, latex gloves covering their hands. Terrie Anderson is stirring a tub of gray grout powder while Sherri Shokler pours in what looks like milk from a thrift-store cream pitcher. Anderson, an educational consultant, is learning the art of mosaicing at a class taught by Sherri, an artist, and Jeff, an archaeologist turne... posted on Jun 6, 2455 reads

Raising Kids Who Care
John Holland-McCowan was sitting on a beach in Hawaii with his parents and his baby brother, Harrison, happily playing with coconuts and driftwood. "I'm so lucky," the almost-five-year-old suddenly announced. "I have all these toys to play with and all my toys at home." His startled parents replied that he was indeed lucky, since a lot of kids didn't have any toys at all. "That's when he started t... posted on Apr 25, 4554 reads

A 13-yr-old Secret Santa
For the second straight Christmas, a philanthropist from Utah's Capitol Hill has been warming the hearts of the homeless and brightening the smiles of hundreds of their children. The benefactor works year-round raising money, networking with businesses, buying and wrapping gifts, and encouraging random residents to pitch in with presents the underprivileged kids otherwise would never see. Jocelyn ... posted on Dec 23, 9740 reads

A Guide to Finding Your Passion
"Following your passion can be a tough thing. But figuring out what that passion is can be even more elusive. I'm lucky -- I've found my passion, and I'm living it. I can testify that it's the most wonderful thing, to be able to make a living doing what you love. And so, in this little guide, I'd like to help you get started figuring out what you'd love doing. This will be the thing that will get ... posted on Feb 5, 86851 reads

The Measure of Meaning: Visiting Wendell Berry
"One of my favorite moments was when Wendell said that he is a member of two organizations: 1) The Slow Communication Movement and 2) The Preservation of Tangibility. He noted that anyone can join these and added with a grin, 'Actually, I think I founded them.'" In this beguiling article, a young singer-songwriter, describes the pilgrimage she took with three friends and a baby to visit Wendell B... posted on Aug 15, 14535 reads

Waiting for the Elvers
"I'm not sure who first saw the wriggly, almost see-through, three-inch bodies of the elvers, or baby eels. But I think it was my energetic five-year-old because I remember his face. When he told me, he had run all the way back to our house through the woods and up our steep bank. His eyes were shining and he was breathless from exertion and excitement. His words tumbled one over the other, and hi... posted on May 2, 3160 reads

Mother's Instincts
Luz Aida Cuevas took one look at the dimpled, dark-haired little girl at a birthday party and instantly knew two things: she was watching her own daughter - presumed killed as a baby in a 1997 fire - and she needed a way to prove it. So Luz pretended the six-year-old girl had gum in her hair, removed five strands from the child's head, folded them in a napkin and put them in a plastic bag. DNA t... posted on Mar 5, 1053 reads

Elephant Orphanage
Stories about an orphanage are bound to yank at your heartstrings. The one 60 Minutes recently told is no exception. All these orphans are from East Africa, they were all abandoned when they were very young -- and they're all elephants! A couple of decades ago, there were about 100,000 elephants in Kenya. Now there are about a quarter as many, largely due to poachers. The orphanage gets distress c... posted on Apr 12, 1870 reads

12 Year Old Who Doesn't Age
Brooke Greenberg has celebrated 12 birthdays according to the calendar but in terms of growing up, she has yet to reach her first! To the mystification of the medical world, Brooke is frozen in time, a real-life, female Peter Pan. She weighs 13lb and measures 27 inches, and looks and acts as if she were a six-month-old baby, not a girl about to become a teenager.... posted on Aug 9, 4242 reads

Excuses, Excuses: Excerpt from Teacher Man
"I was in my third year of teaching creative writing at Ralph McKee Vocational School in Staten Island, New York, when one of my students, 16-year-old Mikey, gave me a note from his mother. It explained his absence from class the day before: "Dear Mr. McCort, Mikey's grandmother who is eighty years of age fell down the stairs from too much coffee and I kept Mikey at home to take care of her and hi... posted on Jul 28, 7440 reads

For Love of Sheeba the Cheetah
"Every parent knows the bittersweet ache of watching their children grow and leave the nest, but what happens when your baby is not yet two years old and can already run as fast as a car? No one knows exactly how a one-month-old cheetah cub made her way under the fence of the Ol Pejeta chimpanzee sanctuary in Kenya in October of 2010. It's no small miracle that sanctuary workers spotted her before... posted on Nov 12, 0 reads

For Love of Sheeba the Cheetah
"Every parent knows the bittersweet ache of watching their children grow and leave the nest, but what happens when your baby is not yet two years old and can already run as fast as a car? No one knows exactly how a one-month-old cheetah cub made her way under the fence of the Ol Pejeta chimpanzee sanctuary in Kenya in October of 2010. It's no small miracle that sanctuary workers spotted her before... posted on Nov 18, 31837 reads

Neema Village: A Place of Hope
In Tanzania, East Africa, a baby rescue center called Neema Village has saved over 100 abandoned, orphaned, and at-risk infants in just 5 years. The list is long of places the infants have been found -- by the roadside, in a yard, a gravel pit, a hotel, a latrine... Mostly they are the babies of mothers who have died or were unable to care for them. Doris Fortson, co-founder of Neema Village says,... posted on Jul 19, 2730 reads

Rachel Callender Sees Superpowers
When Rachel Callendar's baby was born, she was overwhelmed with the negative words used to describe what she saw as the beautiful child in her arms. The doctors saw Evie Amore as disabled and chromosomally damaged but her "mum" Rachel saw her as perfect. Rachel came to the realization that she could find freedom in loving her child just as she was rather than as the doctor's thought she should be.... posted on Aug 27, 8974 reads

Zainika Jagasia: Mumbai's Inspiring 19-Year-Old Model & Baker
"Zainika Jagasia's mother, Reshma Jagasia, says she had a gut feeling throughout her pregnancy that 'there was something wrong'. "It was almost like my child was talking to me all the time," she told The Quint. She stayed conscious during her C-section surgery and when the baby was born, the doctors confirmed that she had Down syndrome. The ever-supportive parents then spent 8 to 10 hours a day wi... posted on Jul 4, 2775 reads

Cooperative Ways to Weather the Silver Tsunami
When Baltimore's Common Ground Cafe abruptly shut down in mid-2023, it wasn't just the loss of a beloved coffee shop, but a devastating jolt to the 30 employees who relied on it for their livelihood. But they weren't ready to give up. Rallying together, the baristas raised thousands of dollars and leaned on each other's strengths. They formed a worker's cooperative and took control of the cafe the... posted on Dec 26, 1599 reads

Mandela's 8 Lessons of Leadership
"Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg -- a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know -- his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly... posted on Oct 21, 8133 reads

Untitled
The 15-25 year old range has been dubbed "Generation Fix". According to a study last year by CIRCLE, 40% of people between the ages of 15 and 25 volunteered in the past year -- compared with 32 percent of GenXers and 32 percent of baby boomers. The number of students involved in service-related school projects has increased 1,400 percent over the past 15 years to 12.6 million, according to the U.S... posted on Jun 4, 1008 reads

Lost Luggage Capital of the World
Did you ever wonder what happens to lost luggage? Unlikely as it may seem, much of it ends up in the small, sleepy town of Scottsboro, Alabama -- home of the Unclaimed Baggage Center! UBC relieves airlines from having to store unclaimed things after they’ve made every effort to locate the owners. Many of the items are sold at marked-down prices, and many others are simply donated to charity: the... posted on Jul 15, 1825 reads

Single Mom Adopts at 64
When Kit Cole decided to adopt a baby at 64, her children, all in their 30s and 40s, were anything but enthusiastic. "They said, 'You're right at a place where you can enjoy all the fruits of your labor. Why do you want to have an infant in your life? You'll never have any rest; you'll have to be dragging him around.'" Cole, a retired CEO, saw their logic, except that she was trying to help a hom... posted on Aug 28, 2314 reads

The Brain Is A Muscle
Stanford's Carol Dweck has found that individuals succeed or fail based on how they think about intelligence, and she says people have one of two mind-sets on the matter. People with a fixed mind-set believe that intelligence is static. The second group, Dweck says, are those with a growth mind-set, who see intelligence to be much like a muscle. Earlier this year, Dweck and two colleagues ran an e... posted on Aug 12, 3129 reads

Seeking Jobs with Impact
Now that the financial system has been rocked to its core, "social capital" is getting a lot of buzz. But what is it? It boils down to putting your efforts into jobs with a socially positive impact, connecting money with meaning and investing with those principles in mind. People of all ages are pursuing those mantras -- from twentysomethings seeking socially responsible jobs straight out of colle... posted on Sep 16, 4014 reads