Crafting Gives Greater Life Satisfaction, Survey Finds
Arts and crafts have long been recommended for improving mental health. New research suggests that everyone could benefit from creative projects such as painting, pottery, and photography. The studies “revealed that people who engaged with creating arts and crafting had greater ratings for happiness, life satisfaction and feeling that life was worthwhile than those who did not…”... posted on Aug 28, 1310 reads

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In 1981, Dr. William P. Magee, a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Kathleen, a nurse and clinical social worker, traveled to the Philippines and found hundreds of children ravaged by deformities. In 1982, they started Operation Smile to provide free reconstructive surgeries and have now operated on tens and thousands of kids.... posted on Nov 24, 957 reads

Bringing Schools to the Children
One Sunday morning with two cloth bags "full of fun and magic for children" and an innovative idea, Inderjit Khurana stepped onto the railway platform and began teaching. The idea was extremely simple and remarkably effective: rather than working to get children into the schools, why not just bring the school to them? Within a few months, the 'platform school,' as it became known, had over 100 stu... posted on Jun 12, 924 reads

Pictures of Beauty in Guatemalan Dumps
Young lives transformed, guided by a camera lens. In Gautemala, Evelyn Mansilla joins her mother and dozens of neighbors to scavenge through the municipal dumps for valuables. But now, the 21 year old Evelyn is part of a program, "Out of the Dump," that brings photography skills and confidence to slum children. As they unblinkingly document impoverished slums that have surreal names like Hope o... posted on May 22, 1391 reads

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Brazilian photographer Sebastio Salgado believes that an image can inform and transform; and he's travlled to five continents to show how. Fast action photography is easy these days but Salgado captures the slower, more decisive motions that produce millions of refugees in Africa, Asia and the Balkans or the millions that move to packed cities of Asia and Latin America due to lack of work ... a p... posted on Dec 28, 1198 reads

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When Liz Murray didn't have a bed, she and a friend would sometimes go to a diner in the Bronx, pool their change to buy french fries with gravy and cheese, and take naps with their heads resting on the table. Since then, the 22-year-old has been to Harvard University and back again in a real-life story of willpower and determination that has inspired a television movie. Liz Murray -- from homel... posted on Apr 8, 1638 reads

Universe Surrenders
For nearly nine days after an earthquake demolished her city in Iran, 97-year-old Sharbanou Mazandarani lay trapped under furniture and crumbled masonry, passing fear-filled days and cold nights with death all around. But on Saturday, elated rescuers pulled her out of the rubble alive -- and unhurt! While the doctors said a low metabolism helped her pull through, the petite, wrinkled woman said ... posted on Jan 6, 1015 reads

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Sam Hamill, a reclusive former Marine turned Zen Buddhist poet was invited to read his poems at the White House. When Laura Bush caught on that he was going to read poems critical of the war on Iraq, she cancelled the event. In response, Sam has set up a website and asked poets to submit poems against the war and affirming collective humanity. Over 12,000 young and old and everything in between... posted on Mar 12, 1684 reads

An Ecological Housing Complex
Way past Ikea lies a Swedish housing complex that is ecologically sound and wired for all sorts of remote-control fiddling with heat, power and security. This unit decontaminates its own soil, recycles its water into a rebuilt marsh ecology, generates power from renewable sources, uses roof space to put oxygen back into the environment and, through sensors and broadband Web access, allows owners ... posted on May 14, 1337 reads

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As teenagers from a rough part of New Jersey, Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins had nothing special going for them except loving mothers (one of whom was a drug user) and above-average intelligence. Their first stroke of luck was testing into University High, one of Newark's three magnet high schools, and their second was finding each other. A decade and a half ago, these three teena... posted on Jun 25, 721 reads

Thai Flavors
They call him "Pak". In Iowa City, he runs an unusual Thai restaurant that has got the pollsters of DC, editors at NY Times, and the community in Iowa, all knocking on his doors. Many people will go to 'Thai Flavors' for its great food, many will go there to answer his polls -- ranging from controversial political and religious questions to "Do you believe in love at first?" and "Do you like to ... posted on Nov 16, 1272 reads

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When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web - dubbed OpenCourseWare - the academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity ... and skeptical of the experiment. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and ... posted on Sep 6, 1326 reads

Thailand Monastary
When Luang Pi Daeng lost his mother and found himself alone in the world, he sought shelter at a local Buddhist temple, where the monks and nuns gave him food, shelter and education. Receiving such kindess, he himself became a monk and vowed to give back to the community. When AIDS began ravaging large swathes of Thailand, he led by example. Today, the abbott of Wat Hua Rin temple, Luang Pi Dae... posted on Dec 9, 1011 reads

Note and a Duffel Bag
More than 28,000 foster children have received the note, a duffel bag and the cuddly friend. "I want you to always know that you are loved, especially by me," the letter says. "And always remember to be positive, polite and never give up. Love, Your Friend, Makenzie." Makenzie Snyder is 13 and it has been her mission since the age of 7 to comfort neglected children; she doesn't meet the children... posted on Dec 19, 1063 reads

The Living Poem
Michael DeGroote is not a man who uses fancy words. He belongs to none of the right clubs, and isn't all that interested in hanging around with the right people. He made a fortune in trucking and garbage; rough-and-tumble businesses that tend to attract rough-and-tumble characters. And he's just given away $105-million -- the single biggest gift in Canadian history.... posted on Jan 2, 1106 reads

Roots and Wings
It was suppossed to be a routine flat-tire change but the jack slipped and an Oklahoma man was pinned under a large van with no way to escape. A ton of glass and metal were crushing his body, he was quickly turning blue. His three young boys knew they had to do something. So the 13, 11 and 10 year old sons lifted the entire van to rescue their Dad and pull him to safety!... posted on Feb 6, 1601 reads

'American Willing to Listen'
Fran Peavey sat nervously on a bench in Osaka, Japan, next to a cloth sign that read, "American Willing to Listen." She tried to smile as people approached, checked her out, and then walked away. Thirty minutes passed before the first person, a man who worked in a shoe factory, spoke to her. What, exactly, was she trying to do? he asked politely. She was seeking "a global heart." Fran had sold ... posted on Mar 13, 1736 reads

It's Name Is Its Message
Its name is its message. In Hebrew, it is Neve Shalom. In Arabic, it is Wahat al-Salam. In English, it is The Oasis of Peace. Situated equidistant from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, this cooperative village was founded in 1972 on 100 acres of leased land and today holds more than 45 families. Here Jewish and Palestinian families live side by side, sharing their gardens and their homes. Since ... posted on Mar 25, 824 reads

Family To Family
All thanks to a mom reading her morning New York Times, a wealthy community in Hastings is now adopting a poverty stricken town in Illinois, one family at a time. "I said 'What do you need?' And he said, 'I was hoping for a miracle.' And I said, 'Well, I'm not a miracle but what do you need?,' " Koner recalled. "And he said, 'Well our people here the last week of the month, the food pantry runs o... posted on Apr 6, 976 reads

Operation Shoe Fly
Operation shoe fly. 1st Sgt. James Thomson and his CF-47D Chinook crew are on a mission in Afghanistan -- deliver shoes to needy children. In addition to soldiers and supplies, Thomson and his "crew dogs" want to drop off shoes, after being moved by the poverty in remote regions of the country. He said, "In addition to protecting the feet of these young innocent children, we might even win some... posted on Jul 16, 1316 reads

Share-It Square
Intersections are generally bland and busy, meant to keep traffic moving. But not the one on Ninth and Sherrett in Portland, Oregon. What was a crime scene in the 70s, is now a bustling corner that serves as a neighborhood meeting place and informal community center. Why? In 1996 neighbors banded together to enhance the intersection with amenities to be shared by all, including a 24-hour-a-day... posted on Jul 17, 1581 reads

We The Media
An open source newspaper, you can call it. A small California newspaper has undertaken a first-of-its-kind experiment: a community newspaper, for and by the community. They are asking people in their neighborhood to be the writers and photographers. Anyone can submit news, which immediately goes up online and if selected, goes into the print edition that reaches 22,000 households. "It's also y... posted on Aug 10, 1341 reads

Four Simple Questions
She was depressed for more than a decade, paranoid and agoraphobic, and for two years didn’t get out of bed. Although she had plenty of money and a beautiful home, she was miserable and eventually moved into a hostel for women with eating disorders — the only place with mental health support that her insurance policy would pay for. Then, one morning, she woke up and it was all gone. "Instead o... posted on Aug 12, 1208 reads

Second Generation Traffic
Get rid of stop signs and red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. That's what a new school of traffic design says, citing many examples in the developing countries that work amazingly well. For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. Designer Ben Hamilton adds, "The histo... posted on Sep 7, 1166 reads

Seeds of Change
The premise was pretty simple, maybe obvious: A lot of city kids are living and learning in environments that are failing them. So why not just take them out? Catch them right out of elementary school and move them into dormitories where you can teach them social and life skills. During the day, immerse them in an intensive college-preparatory curriculum comparable to elite boarding schools. Lavis... posted on Feb 16, 2725 reads

A brain walks into a bar...
Imagine that you are sitting with a friend and suddenly, your friend's face starts to convulse involuntary. Her facial muscles, particularly her lips, stretch and she has a peculiar expression in her eyes. Oddly enough, nobody around you even turns his head to look as your friend chokes, trying to take broken, sudden inhalations, while her shoulders jerk and her entire body twists and shakes.Call ... posted on Feb 22, 1137 reads

New Apollo Project
In 1961 John F Kennedy, in a move to address the Cold War threat and inspire and unify America, challenged the nation to put a man on the moon with the Apollo project. Today, labor and environmental groups, Republicans and Democrats have begun teaming up to create a new Apollo project with a bold vision that putting America's resources into energy independence will fuel job growth, increased geopo... posted on Apr 12, 1363 reads

Will That Lady Be On The News?
"When I was about four of five, I was walking down the street with my Mum one day. Ahead of us, an elderly lady was walking slowly when suddenly she tripped and fell off the curb and couldn't get up. My Mum made a call to an ambulance to come help her and we waited with the old lady until they arrived. She thanked my Mum and we continued walking. I turned to my mother and asked, "Will that lady b... posted on Sep 29, 3206 reads

A Place Where Women Rule
Ten years ago, a group of Kenyan women that had been raped and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands and shamed by their community, established the village of Umoja, which means unity in Swahili, and decided no men would be allowed to live in their circular village of mud-and-dung huts. Lead by their charismatic matriarch, Rebecca Lolosoli, the village has become a haven for women suffering f... posted on Aug 13, 1166 reads

Ford's Fortune
Bob Ford didn't let the pine tree that Hurricane Katrina hurled through his roof, narrowly missing him, slow him down. After the storm, the Jackson Mississippi golf-course owner and caterer took the food out of his freezer and drove to the Mississippi Coliseum to feed some 1,200 New Orleans refugees. When provisions ran out, he went on local television to plead for more donations. When the Red Cro... posted on Sep 14, 1401 reads

Business as Unusual
At Denmark's KaosPilots business school, students learn how to set up and carry out projects, sell their ideas, put together a business plan, stimulate creativity, work cooperatively, inspire others and themselves, and realize their dreams. And it shows in their results: one group of students project inspired the youth of Sarajevo to raise funds and rebuild the youth centre that was shot to piece... posted on Sep 17, 1212 reads

Healing the City of Angels
As a teenager, Andy Lipkis learned that smog was killing the forests of Southern California. He and his friends began planting and caring for trees, and were dubbed the “tree people.” More than 30 years later, Andy’s pathfinding efforts have proven the feasibility of making large cities sustainable, and have resulted in the planting of two million trees, the education of one million schoolch... posted on Oct 17, 1016 reads

Call of Duty
Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli Black Hawk helicopter pilot who in September 2003 made public a “pilots’ letter of refusal” which he authored and 26 other pilots signed. “We refuse to take part in attacks by the Air Force on civilian populations, and we refuse to harm innocent civilians. These acts are illegal and immoral, and the direct result of the ongoing occupation, which corrupts Israeli... posted on Jan 27, 1188 reads

Unreasonable Woman
Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, began fishing the bays off the Gulf Coast of Texas at the age of eight. By 24 she was a boat captain. In 1989, while running her brother's fish house at the docks and mending nets, she read a newspaper article that listed her home of Calhoun County as the number one toxic polluter in the country. She set up a meeting in the town hall to discuss what the ... posted on Jan 30, 2807 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, 2765 reads

From the Heart
HeartMath studies define a critical link between the heart and brain. The heart is in a constant two-way dialogue with the brain — our emotions change the signals the brain sends to the heart and the heart responds in complex ways. However, we now know that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

This research explains how the heart respon... posted on Mar 5, 1907 reads

300 Stories From an Eight Year Old
Adora Svitak loves to read and write. Over the past 18 months she has had a 296-page book published and written 400 short stories and nearly 100 poems. Typing at 80 words a minute, she has produced 370,000 words while reading up to three books a day. The last novel she finished was Voltaire's Candide. And her greatest ambition? To get a Nobel prize in Literature and Peace. Not bad for an eight-ye... posted on Apr 6, 1999 reads

The Paradoxical Commandments
Sometimes ripples take time to spread. Written in the turbulent sixties, when student activists were seizing buildings, throwing rocks at police and shouting down opponents, Kent Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments provided an alternative voice. Kent wrote them as a booklet for high school leaders when he was a 19 year-old at Harvard. "I laid down the Paradoxical Commandments as a challenge," he sa... posted on Apr 18, 2253 reads

Playing For Change: Peace Through Music
Mark Johnson is the producer of a remarkable documentary about the simple but transformative power of music: Playing For Change: Peace Through Music. The film brings together musicians from around the world -- blues singers in a waterlogged New Orleans, chamber groups in Moscow, a South African choir -- to collaborate on songs familiar and new, in the effort to foster a new, greater understanding ... posted on Oct 28, 3928 reads

Be Nice -- It's Good For Business!
Negativity costs the U.S. economy an estimated $300 billion a year! On the flip side, research shows that positivity pays -- quite literally! Donald O. Clifton was one of the first psychologists to study the link between profit, productivity and positivity. Diagnosed with cancer, he raced to finish the story of the research behind his famous Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket, along with practica... posted on May 29, 2738 reads

We Are What We Do
We Are What We Do -- it's not just a catchy phrase: it's a web movement that inspires people to use their everyday actions to change the world, whoever they are, and wherever they are. They’ve created 50 simple, everyday actions that can improve our environment, our health, and our communities, making our planet and the people on it happier. To date, over 330,000 small actions (and counting!) ha... posted on May 23, 3178 reads

The Shine of Fair Trade Diamonds
Raymond Scott retired from Boeing after 30 years, so that he could focus full-time on giving Sierra Leone –- his native country -– a chance to shine. Scott and the New York-based custom jewelry firm Finesse Diamonds plan to introduce what they say are the world's first "fair-trade diamonds," mined on territory controlled by Scott's family and neighboring chiefdoms, and polished in newly built ... posted on May 25, 1378 reads

Montreal Homeless Choir
The 22 men in spangled baseballs caps don't much look like a choir. They don't stand up straight, they tend to wobble back and forth as they perform, and they're homeless! With a hastily prepared repertoire of four Christmas carols, this ragtag collection of 19-to-68 year old homeless choristers took their voices to the streets -- or under them: their debut was December 17, 1996, at the Berri-UQAM... posted on Jun 13, 2883 reads

Beloved 'Hijos' of Mother Antonia
Mary Clarke grew up in glamour-infused Beverly Hills, was married twice, and raised seven children in relative domestic bliss. Then, at the age of fifty, she experienced a calling to serve humanity so strong that it led her to literally sew her own habit and move to one of the most infamous penitentiaries in Mexico in order to help the inmates there. For nearly fifteen years, she had little suppor... posted on Jun 1, 2493 reads

UK's Biggest School Scraps Homework
A new school that will be the biggest in the country is to abandon homework because the head teacher believes it does not justify the detentions and family rows it causes. Nottingham East academy, which will have 3,570 pupils, claims it will be the first school to scrap homework. It will instead have an extra lesson and after-school activities such as sport, model aircraft-building and sari-making... posted on Oct 12, 3323 reads

Musical Protest of Courage and Beauty
It was May 27th, 1992, in Sarajevo. A group of civilians were standing in a breadline, hoping for their share of a dwindling food supply when a mortar shell fell from the sky. Twenty-two innocent men, women and children were killed. It was May 28th, 1992, when principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, Vedran Smailovic, took his cello to the crater left by the deadly blast and, amidst the ... posted on Jun 19, 1660 reads

The Abbot and 18 Tigers
Thirty years ago he was diagnosed with leukemia. Convinced that he had just a short time to live he made the decision to become a Buddhist monk. Today Abbot Archan Poosit is not just alive -- he is saving lives -- the lives of over a dozen tigers in the jungles of Thailand. He and his monastery are the caretakers of 18 tigers that were brought to him after being abused by poachers. They took them... posted on Jul 1, 2892 reads

From Prison Bars to Bar Exam
He spent twelve years in a Texas prison -- for a crime he didn’t commit. And now he has graduated from law school and headed towards a career in criminal justice -- the field that tragically let him down. Christopher Ochoa was freed after law students had his case reinvestigated and proved him innocent. Today the 39-year-old is inspiringly free from anger or bitterness and very clear about the v... posted on Jul 13, 2289 reads

51-Day Self-Transcendence Race
It's a 51-day event and the world's longest foot race, but instead of going 3,100 miles from New York to Los Angeles, they will circle one city block in Queens -- for two months straight. Athletes wear out more than 12 pairs of shoes, run more than two marathons daily and all but one of this year's runners are foreigners who left their jobs as postal workers, gardeners and factory workers. And t... posted on Jul 29, 3040 reads

Serving on Philadelphia's Streets
On Dec. 8, 1983, 12-year-old Trevor Ferrell saw a news report explaining that it was a "code-blue" night, meaning it was so cold that Philadelphia’s "street people" were being taken into shelters. "I thought it was one person who was living on the street," says Ferrell, "I wanted to go see this man." So he pestered his dad until he took him into Center City, where he gave one man a blanket and d... posted on Aug 16, 2487 reads