Teaching 21st Century Skills
For decades, the emphasis in public education has been on making sure that students can read, write, and do math. But can they apply those skills in a real-world scenario, such as designing a bridge? Can they identify what information they need and use digital tools to find it? Those are some of the capabilities known as "21st-century skills". In a knowledge economy, the reasoning goes, the abilit... posted on Jan 8, 6196 reads

To All Artists, Known and Unknown
"The radiant little man died at the Art Institute. I knew he was homeless and hanging out at the school, but I was unaware that he was living there. He died of exposure over Christmas break, and when he was found beneath a concrete overhang on the Jones Street side of the school, they found a number of sketchbooks in a backpack." So starts a beautiful reflection on the life and work of an unknown ... posted on Jan 13, 3873 reads

Why We Do What We Do
Popular personality and speaker Tony Robbins talks about what makes people do what they do. In addition to a priceless exchange between Robbins and former Vice President Al Gore, who was in the audience, the talk focuses on the emotional and psychological strengths of people, and how they direct action. The thread that runs through the talk is the conviction that giving is the most important and f... posted on Jan 15, 6595 reads

Polishing Up The Diamond
The Jacobs Family Foundation is a $21 million family fund that was created to revitalize a southeastern San Diego neighborhood called "The Diamond". Frustrated by the limited results they achieved by providing grants and technical assistance to nonprofits, President and CEO Jennifer Vanica and the Jacobs family decided to work directly with the community. Instead of just funding the 200 nonprofit ... posted on Jan 18, 3047 reads

A Farming Couple's Astonishing Legacy
Arlene and Willis Hatch lived simple lives on a farm near the tiny town of Alto, Michigan. They never had children of their own but saw their neighbors as family members, and after the Hatches were killed in an auto accident, their neighbors discovered how deep that feeling went. Their sudden death left the community heartbroken. Then a few weeks later, the letters started arriving. More than 70 n... posted on Feb 5, 5325 reads

Finding Friends on Horseback
On a chilly morning nearly two weeks ago, Donna Byrne packed everything she owned onto one horse, climbed atop another, and set out for Ocala, a ranching town 160 miles north. She said she lost her job in Arcadia a few months ago, could not afford the rent, and hoped to pick up some work in Ocala before riding on to Amarillo, Texas. "I take it one "I take one day at a time," said Ms. Byrne,"I don... posted on Feb 16, 3365 reads

Ten Ways to Reduce Waste
"Out here where we live you are responsible for getting rid of your own garbage. ... If you've never been to your city dump I can recommend visiting one for an educational experience. We live near a medium-sized city, and its official dumpsite stretches from horizon to horizon. A complete network of ramps, lanes, traffic signs and roads criss-crosses the entire area. ... You get out of your truck ... posted on Mar 3, 7346 reads

Wake Up Call For the World
Peter Russell, a Cambridge-trained physicist and futurist who has written about consciousness for four decades, should have been at a high point in his life. Fifteen years ago, Russell's book, The White Hole in Time, had just been published; he was a popular teacher and corporate consultant, his work lauded by leading thinkers. But, Russell says, "I was feeling an inner disquiet. What I was saying... posted on Mar 5, 3894 reads

NY Cabbies Help Orphaned Twins
Almost 100,000 New York City cabbies are coming together to contribute to help raise and educate 13-year-old twin boys whose parents were killed in a hit-and-run accident. The taxi federation asked both yellow and livery cab drivers to donate one day's tips, a sum the group estimates averages about $15 to $20. The twins are being raised by their uncle, Akram Audah and aunt, Fatma Elnahal. Audah i... posted on Mar 7, 2996 reads

Acts of Random Kindness
"I was in this cafe the other week," says Cameron Stewart, "and I was buying an ice-cream. So I gave the guy at the desk a fiver and said, the next person who orders an ice cream, tell them it is on the house. Tell them it's free, and this will pay for it." Cameron Stewart is an 18-year-old from Holywood, near Belfast, and this sort of thing is exactly his forte. He is the proprietor of Ark cloth... posted on Mar 29, 4601 reads

A Full-Time Job Paying-It-Forward
When Trevor Patzer was growing up in Ketchum, Idaho, he received an unusual offer from family friend Ric Ohrstrom: get admitted to New Hampshire's prestigious St. Paul's School, and Mr. Ohrstrom would foot the entire bill for his schooling there. Mr. Patzer was accepted and graduated three years later. He says the experience of someone offering to pay for his high-school education had a profound ... posted on Apr 3, 3956 reads

From Wall Street to Basketball Coach
Jamal Adams starred on the basketball court at Loyola High in the late '80s. He was captain, league MVP, and much more. After college, he headed for Wall Street. Waking in the pre-dawn each day for the market's opening bell, chasing money like a mouse chasing ever distant slices of cheddar, he grew unfulfilled and unhappy. So unhappy that he took a second job as an assistant coach at Loyola High... posted on Mar 25, 2239 reads

Putting the Cycling in Recycling
Alex Jarrett, 33, has never owned a car. Around town, he gets almost everywhere he needs to go by the power of his own two feet-walking or biking. So it seems only natural that Jarrett's business, which he started with Ruthy Woodring in 2002, is bicycle-based. Jarrett and Woodring are the founders of Pedal People Cooperative Inc., which they describe as "a human-powered delivery and hauling servic... posted on Apr 15, 3019 reads

Vimala Cooks. Everybody Eats.
Vimala Rajendran's personal story shines with resilience and inspiration. It is the story of someone who refused to be a victim and who chose to give back. For 12 years, Vimala has blended her love of cooking with a commitment to community to create weekly dinners in her Chapel Hill home. These dinners have grown to feed up to 100 people weekly. Men in collared shirts, women with dreadlocks, stude... posted on Apr 24, 3702 reads

Extraordinary Minds
Mozart, Freud, Virginia Woolf and Gandhi. Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard, in one of his books, "Extraordinary Minds," examines these four people of tremendous ability. Using these four extraordinary, but very different, people, he attempts to answer a question once posed by Plato and still asked today: Is there a set of traits that is shared among all great achievers no matter how different ... posted on May 10, 3462 reads

Tweenbots & The Kindness of Strangers
Can a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? That's the question that impelled Kacie Kinzer to create Tweenbot -- a human-dependent robot that navigates the city with the help of pedestrians it encounters. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight ... posted on May 15, 4749 reads

The Story of An Amazing Catch
Marvin Goldstein was a toddler in 1945 when he experienced a catch rivaling any you'd see at a baseball game. "The windows at that time did not have window guards," Goldstein remembers. "I leaned out, and I had one hand on the window inside and the other hand I was leaning out. [I] let go and fell five stories." Sal Mauriello, a barber, was coming home early from work that day. He heard a woman sc... posted on Jun 7, 4984 reads

The Joy of Less
"I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I'd noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I'd imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity o... posted on Jun 13, 3525 reads

30 Students Defying Expectation
Every April, some 230,000 Indians take the intensely competitive entrance exam to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) -- the seven prestigious schools that train India's top-notch engineers and entrepreneurs. Only 5,000 students get in. Most come from the middle-class and prepare for the test through private coaching. But in the past few years, a small group of desperately poor, talented st... posted on Jun 24, 2822 reads

How to Build a Bigger Brain
People have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain? Meditate. That's the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution MRI's to scan the brains of people who meditate. Research has already confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, man... posted on Jul 4, 6976 reads

From Homeless to Harvard
"Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion. She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework. "No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her. Around here, Khadijah is known as "H... posted on Jun 26, 6021 reads

Two Dogs,Two Thousand Miles
Two dogs are walking more than 2,000 miles from Austin, Texas, to Boston to raise awareness, and maybe some money, for canine cancer research. It would be hard to miss these two, for they are very large, very white Great Pyrenees. Murphy and Hudson are traveling with their owner, Luke Robinson, 38. He conceived the Texas-to-Massachusettes trek after the death of a beloved dog "changed my life," he... posted on Jul 12, 3872 reads

Teenager Finds Solution to Plastic
Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true. After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them. Now a Canadian teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in ... posted on Aug 5, 6960 reads

In Good We Trust
San Francisco has nearly one nonprofit organization for every 100 residents, and the Bay Area spends more than twice as much per capita in the nonprofit sector as the nation does as a whole. SF Bay Area innovators have been drivers of the environmental, antiwar, civil rights, and AIDS movements and now the nonprofit sector. "They wanted to change the world, and now a lot of them are, by running k... posted on Aug 11, 3869 reads

Voluntary Simplicity
While working for the think-tank, Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), Duane Elgin co-authored the following report with Arnold Mitchell in 1976 for the Business Intelligence Program. Titled Voluntary Simplicity, this was the most popular report published to that date by the program and it stirred national interest in the theme of simplicity. This in-depth article is an updated ver... posted on Aug 12, 4503 reads

Promise to Smile At Random People
Bren Bataclan's cheerful cartoon creatures have been exhibited in some high places: at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in Logan International Airport and even on a Girl Scout patch. But lately he's been leaving his artwork outside unemployment offices and closed-down retail stores across the country. For free. It all started when Bataclan moved to Boston from the Midwest to teach computer gra... posted on Sep 5, 4174 reads

18-Minute Plan For Managing Your Day
"Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people's problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had ... posted on Sep 23, 13200 reads

Age Old Wisdom for the New Economy
"When we were looking for some wisdom on building a new economy, I immediately thought of Rebecca Adamson. Native peoples have developed societies that function within ecological limits and counter the tendency of societies to polarize between rich and poor, powerful and excluded. Adamson, a Cherokee, is founder of First Nations Development Institute and First Peoples Worldwide. She works globally... posted on Oct 9, 3994 reads

A 16-year-old Dancer's Awe-inspiring Performance at Julliard
Kiera Brinkley contracted a deadly bacterial infection, when she was just 2 years old, that required doctors to amputate her arms and legs. But they couldn't take away her love of dance. In August 2009 she realized a long-standing dream of hers and performed at Juillard in New York city, and in the process reinforced for students there what one Julliard instructor describes as the "magic of dance ... posted on Sep 14, 7954 reads

Lost Dog Gathers Clues to Find its Family
After the car had flipped over and landed on the side of the road, rescue workers never figured a dog was among those in the car. So, Ella, a Rottweiler, was left to the streets -- for two weeks, emaciated and drinking from a drainage ditch along an empty stretch of highway. Ella, though, gathered broken glass and tail lights from the crash and returned to it every night. And it was those clue... posted on Oct 2, 7849 reads

A Lighthouse Keeper's Message In A Bottle
Each year on her birthday, Ann Hernandez and her friend, Alan Tomaska, would settle on the rocky shore of Thacher Island and say a toast to the day. When the tide going out, Hernandez would tuck a handwritten message inside a bottle and Tomaska would hurl it over the rocks and into the crashing surf.Tomaska considered the ritual a lark. But for Hernandez, the messages in a bottle were a kind of pe... posted on Nov 11, 4641 reads

Mali's Gift Economy
Sometimes, we get the most from giving without receiving. In Mali, villagers have embraced this idea for centuries in their vibrant gift economy, called 'dama'. It encourages Malians to maintain social connections with family, friends, and complete strangers, by providing goods and services with no expectation of a return gift. Instead, the villagers understand that a gift will be "paid forward... posted on Oct 16, 3774 reads

Cleaning Shoes, Making A Difference
Greg Woodburn spends a lot of time cleaning sneakers. Some of them once belonged to him; some belonged to his friends. But soon the shoes will have new owners: underprivileged children in the United States and 20 other countries, thanks to Woodburn's Share Our Soles (S.O.S.) charity. It all began when Woodburn, a high school track star, was sidelined for months with knee and hip injuries. "I start... posted on Nov 20, 3163 reads

Yawn for Good Health?
Dogs yawn before attacking, Olympic athletes yawn before performing, and fish yawn before they change activities. Evidence even exists that yawning helps individuals on military assignment perform their tasks with greater accuracy and ease. Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating so... posted on Dec 1, 6178 reads

70 Words of Wisdom for 2010
Seth Godin, the innovator, writer, and blogger extraordinaire, persuaded 70 other innovators, writers, and bloggers to participate in a project he calls What Matters Now.The idea is simple: Each of us suggests one word -- literally one word -- that all of us should think about in 2010, and then takes one page to explain why and how that word matters. The result is an intriguing, inspiring, and at ... posted on Feb 2, 13385 reads

A 1000 Mile Walk Relying On Kindness
His name is Garth Poorman, and he's a man on a mission. Poorman, who left his home in Hebron in upstate New York on August 29, is walking all the way to New Orleans. Along the way, he is looking for a few kind and generous hearts. "I wanted to see if I could walk half-way across America, depending solely on the kindness of friends and strangers to share dinner with me and host me in their homes fo... posted on Jan 19, 3465 reads

Fortune That Made Him Miserable
Mr. Rabeder is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued over $2 million. Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence. Already gone is his collection of six gliders, a luxury Audi A8a and the interior furnishings and accessories business that made his fortune. "My idea is to have nothing left. A... posted on Feb 11, 6140 reads

Grannies With A Mission
They're 13 grannies, more famously known as the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. Facing a world in crisis, these women of wisdom believe that new solutions will emerge if we can shrink our mind-heart distance to zero. Respected medicine women and shamans from the Americas, the Arctic Circle, Asia, and Africa, all these grandmothers say they received the message, through... posted on Feb 10, 4527 reads

The Man Who Carved Statues
As children, we naturally make art out of our lives. We paint with our fingers, color fantasies with crayons, build living room pillow forts, and dance and hum as we walk. Jim Barton, though, has continued his art-making through his adult life -- transforming decaying tree stumps, junkyard wooden doors, and scrap wood into mystical carvings, giant buddhas, and elegant salmon soaring into the sky... posted on Mar 17, 3890 reads

From Mansion to Mud Hut
Most of us would dig deep in our pockets to donate to a good cause, but how many of us would sacrifice everything? Wealthy businessman Jon Pedley is about to do just that. The 41 year-old is selling his comfortable home, successful consulting business, and top-of-the-line car to kick-off a service-immersion program in rural Uganda. The hope is to improve the community's health, water, and educatio... posted on Mar 24, 4634 reads

In Pursuit of Silence: How noise really is killing us
For most Americans, silence is rare. Traffic and airplane noise fill major cities. Cellphone conversations have taken over parks, buzzing electronics have invaded homes and each store has its own carefully shaped "sonic environment." In his new book, "In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise," George Prochnik argues that noise poses a real threat to our cardiovascular syst... posted on Apr 28, 5062 reads

9-Year-Old Entrepreneurs!
9-year-old Neha started off selling handmade greeting cards and wine charms. Now, at 13, her nonprofit has raised $30,000 for orphans in India. 10-year-old Kelly invented the T-Pack (a fanny pack worn on the thigh). Now a millionaire, she teaches entrepreneurship to children, and is an author on the side. Oh, and she's 18. With the internet providing easy access to business innovation websites lik... posted on Apr 20, 5059 reads

Monks Bolster Earthquake Relief
Long after bulldozers have been silenced and rescue workers have retired to their tents, the only sound in earthquake-battered city Jiegu, China, is the barking of dogs that have lost their homes and owners. As the smoke from a thousand campfires filled the air early one morning, solitary figures shuffled through darkness, heading nowhere in particular. Some, like Tsai Ba Mao, 63, went to a tent o... posted on May 15, 2020 reads

Blind 17-Year-Old Excels in Track
He has skied, done karate, completed triathlons, wrestled, and become such an impressive skateboarder that he attracted the attention of legend Tony Hawk. And, since the age of 2, he has been blind. Now a junior in high school, seventeen-year-old Tommy Carroll runs track and cross-country races by holding his teammates' elbows and listening to their descriptions of distances, obstacles, and the te... posted on May 2, 1783 reads

8 Ways to Sleep Better
If sleep has plunged to the bottom of your to-do list, you're not alone. Although the National Sleep Foundation recommends getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night, the average American logs only 6 hours and 40 minutes. But before turning to over-the-counter medications, Karen Asp recommends eight natural remedies that can soothe anxieties and help you get a good night's sleep. She introduces ... posted on May 13, 10357 reads

The Little Things
In the wake of a hurricane, Beverly Jordan goes door to door, delivering emergency relief. At one dilapidated house, the young owners respond to Jordan's arrival by offering a bag of diapers and five bags of food for her to pass on to others in need. In his senior year of college, Peter Strupp finds himself penniless, seeking refuge in soup kitchens, and unable to afford his rent. The night before... posted on May 14, 3612 reads

Operation Smile!
The average Facebook user creates 70 pieces of content per month, virtually poking people, finding friends or updating their status on what they ate for dinner. But this social application means something else for Sherry Evans and Tim Foster. "I can't imagine my life right now without Facebook," says Evans. Twenty-three years ago, the two were classmates at Althoff Catholic High School. Through Fa... posted on Jun 23, 3693 reads

Solace through Hot Food
Last month, ash clouds spewed out of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, causing air traffic in Europe to come to a sudden halt. With high hotel costs and expensive airport food, many stranded passengers found themselves tired, hungry, out of money, and making beds out of airport terminal chairs. In response, humanitarian relief organization United Sikhs arrived at London's Heathrow airport and be... posted on May 22, 2654 reads

Stopping Bullets with Jobs
"Nothing stops a bullet like a job," says the motto of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the country. For the past 20 years, Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who started Homeboy, has counseled more than 12,000 gang members who pass through Homeboy each year to learn job skills and attend therapy sessions on everything from alcohol abuse to anger management. Since leav... posted on Jun 24, 2751 reads

Moral Life of Babies
Not long ago, Paul Bloom watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. On a quest to discover the nature of morality, Bloom and his fellow researchers are exploring the moral lives of babies for the answer. While it may seem like babies are helpless, ignorant, and undisciplined, recent studies at Yale University's Infant Cognition Center indicates that, even in the first year of life, ... posted on Jun 2, 2744 reads