Transforming a Village on $3 a Month
When Phulbasin Yadav and 11 other women set aside $3 a month to start a business, skeptical elders turned the town against them. When Ms. Yadav learned to ride a bicycle, traveling between villages to set up health clinics and offer hot meals for children, her husband threw her out of the house, saying she was ignoring her duties at home. Business in Sukuldhain, India had always been a man's world... posted on May 15, 2201 reads

Young Golfer Playing Against The Odds
There is more than one reason that MacKinzie Kline has been generating headlines in the United States lately. The most obvious of them is that she suffers from an incurable heart defect that means she may not live to see her 30th birthday, and yet she has managed to work her way on to the women's professional golf circuit at the tender age of 15. That might be enough to grab anybody's attention. W... posted on May 21, 2309 reads

A Clinic That Gives Prescriptions ... for Action
If you’ve ever experienced acute concern over environmental issues, specialist Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, of NYU’s Environmental Health Clinic, might be able to help. To be clear, Jeremijenko, 40, has a Ph.D., not an M.D. And the project is part of NYU’s Art Department, not the School of Public Health. Her credentials as an artist and environ-mental activist, however, are solid. Ever since 199... posted on May 29, 1730 reads

Executive on a Mission: Saving the Planet
As Ray Anderson was preparing a speech at Interface, a billion dollar carpet title company he founded, he had a stark realization -- "I was running a company that was plundering the earth." While they fully complied with the law, he knew that wasn't enough. So he challenged his employees to find ways to turn it all around, and forestalled objections from his own stockholders. “He bet his enti... posted on May 23, 2253 reads

Your Life (And How You Tell It)
Researchers have long been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, but they have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. Yet in the past decade a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality.... posted on May 28, 3745 reads

Forgetfulness: A Tool of the Brain
A note to the forgetful: be thankful you don’t remember everything. It means your brain is working properly. According to a new study, the brain only chooses to remember memories it thinks are most relevant, and actively suppresses those that are similar but less used, helping to lessen the cognitive load and prevent confusion. "Whenever you’re engaging in remembering, the brain adapts. It’s... posted on Jun 9, 2555 reads

The Odyssey Project
Students in the Odyssey Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison are near the poverty level, and most are encountering higher education for the first time. As one Odyssey graduate wrote, "I would never have thought that classes in the humanities would change my life forever. I mean 'forever' without exaggeration because writing, art history, American history, literature, and philosophy transport... posted on Jun 20, 1418 reads

Three Men Sailing Against All Odds
An unusual sailing crew is gearing up to compete in the North Sea Yacht Race on 1 July. All three men have lost limbs -- and only have three hands and three feet between them. The race, which takes two to three days, is one of the longest and perhaps most challenging ocean races in Northern Europe, starting in the Norwegian port of Stavanger and finishing in Macduff, Scotland. This audio slideshow... posted on Jun 18, 2161 reads

Familiar Beats in a New School
They trudged in, eyes cast down with no sign of a smile, unsure what to expect.Then they noticed the two drummers playing African beats. One by one, the Burundian children took over the skin-covered drums, cola-nut shakers and rhythm sticks, stomping the floor and dancing to the music. This was how the child refugees were introduced to the Dallas Independent School District. The 16 children had co... posted on Jul 5, 1725 reads

Homeless Shelter Gets Extreme Makeover
When a friend asked her to help women battling homelessness and abuse, Terry Grahl made a visit to their shelter. "It was as if the room was screaming out, 'Save me!' I knew I had found my calling -- a passion and purpose which, I was sure would lead to the transformation of, not just a room, but the lives of many women." Grahl, an interior designer who owns Terry's Enchanted Cottage in Taylor, b... posted on Jun 28, 2965 reads

Not Buying It: The Freegan Movement
The day after New York University's class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of an N.Y.U. dormitory. They had come to take advantage of the university's end-of-the-year move-out, when students'discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb. Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man wearing two bowler hats, unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, found a paintin... posted on Jun 30, 1956 reads

The Elders: Veteran Diplomats Unite
Melding serious statesmanship and a dose of audacity, Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and a clutch of international figures are announcing an alliance to diplomatically tackle the world's most intractable problems. The alliance, unveiled during the events marking Mr Mandela's 89th birthday, is to be called the Elders. It includes the retired Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, th... posted on Jul 20, 1484 reads

The Little Island That Could
It's a two-hour ferry ride to the Danish island of Samso — and it can seem like a trip back through time. But if you look more closely, to visit Samso is to see the future. Samso is an area about 40 square miles long with a permanent population of about 4,000 — all of them living a green dream. Take farmer Erik Andersen. His tractor runs on oil from seed, which he grows. His hot water and powe... posted on Jul 21, 2369 reads

When Was The Last Time You...
"When is the last time you cut someone off in traffic or scared someone with an insistent and angry horn? When was the last time you took the last cart, or cookie, or pool chair and pretended not to look at someone waiting behind you? When was the last time you said no when you could have said yes? When was the last time you cut someone you love with words because you were tired, cranky, hurt, ove... posted on Aug 17, 4336 reads

Why Old Habits Die Hard
Habits help us through the day, eliminating the need to strategize about each tiny step involved in making a frothy latte, driving to work and other complex routines. Bad habits, though, can have a vise grip on both mind and behavior. Notoriously hard to break, they are devilishly easy to resume, as many reformed smokers discover. A study led by Ann Graybiel of MIT now shows why. Important neural ... posted on Aug 16, 3101 reads

What Makes You Happy?
So you're between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? According to a recent survey the answer is sweet and simple. Spending time with family was the top answer to that open-ended question, according to an extensive survey -- more than 100 questions asked of 1,280 people ages 13-24 -- conducted by The Associated Press and MTV on the nature of happiness among America's young people. Next wa... posted on Aug 21, 3255 reads

Philosophy & Recycling in Albania
Miranda Fejzo is an unlikely person to find standing in the middle of a rubbish heap. Smartly dressed in matching black jacket and skirt, with white high heels, she explains the intricacies of recycling while carefully navigating between piles of discarded plastic bottles and heaps of cardboard and tins."Here comes the rubbish," she says - long, silver coloured fingernails pointing at a battered t... posted on Aug 22, 2300 reads

Walking Across America
32 years ago Peter Jenkins began his first epic journey across the country. He started that trip as a disenchanted young man, so upset by war, politics, and the troubled state of race relations that he was ready to abandon America. An older friend urged him to give the country a closer look. So he began walking in October 1973, starting in Alfred, 300 miles northwest of Manhattan, accompanied by h... posted on Aug 23, 2371 reads

A Clinic for the Little Things that Matter Most
To talk. To be listened to. To unwind. When you are a low-income woman with cancer, it is often the little things -- a caring touch, a steaming cup of herbal tea -- that can make a difference. The Charlotte Maxwell Clinic addresses an invisible problem -- the economic and emotional fallout that cancer can have on low-income women already underserved by the health care system. The clinic -- a volun... posted on Aug 31, 2009 reads

Eighty Year Study On Happiness & Giving
One of the longest-running social-science studies on happiness began in Oakland, California, in the 1920s with 200 people. It combined semi-annual interviews until participants graduated from high school, and has since followed them at intervals of 10 years. An astounding 90 percent of people have stayed in the study, giving it coherence and offering insights into what constitutes a happy life. On... posted on Sep 2, 5956 reads

Holistic Business School Serves Disadvantaged
An actuary turned management consultant, Taddy Blecher first stepped into a South African township by mistake. "I was terrified and thought I was going to die," he remembers. In 1995, he was at the point of moving to America, but at the last minute he decided to stay and make a difference. He and three partners then started CIDA City Campus, a $21/month-tuition, holistic business university for 15... posted on Sep 16, 1955 reads

Health Through Friendship
According to research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., having close friends you can count on has far-reaching benefits for your physical and mental health. A strong social network can be critical to helping you through the stress of tough times, whether you've had a bad day at work or a year filled with loss or chronic illness. Dr. Edward T. Creagan is a cancer specialist at the Mayo Clinic... posted on Sep 20, 3236 reads

88 Keys To Happiness
Harlan Creech fell in love with the piano when Woodrow Wilson was president. It was 1920 and Creech was 8 -- a creek-splashing dreamer stuck with a squeaky violin his parents made him play. His sister got the piano, which sounded to him like a sunny day set to music. He's wanted to play ever since. Creech grew up to be a husband, a father and a Methodist minister -- a job where he made time for ev... posted on Sep 23, 3466 reads

The Billionaire Who Wasn't
He wears a $15 watch, flies economy class and does not own a house or car. For years. few guessed that Chuck Feeney was one of the world's biggest philanthropists, secretly giving away his fortune. Born in New Jersey during the Depression, Feeney co-founded the world's largest duty-free retail chain. He liked making money but not having it, and gave it away for years in strict secrecy. Conor O'Cle... posted on Sep 25, 4186 reads

How Captcha Puzzles Serve
A weapon used to fight spammers is now helping university researchers preserve old books and manuscripts. Many websites use an automated test to tell computers and humans apart when signing up for an account or logging in. Known as captcha puzzles, these tests usually contain a few random letters in an image, arranged in such a way that automated programs cannot read. Carnegie Mellon scientists h... posted on Oct 7, 1850 reads

The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
Conventional wisdom says that scaling social innovation starts with strengthening internal management capabilities. But a recent study of 12 high-impact nonprofits including Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity and the Exploratorium shows that real social change happens when organizations go outside their own walls and find creative ways to enlist the help of others. The secret to their success... posted on Oct 8, 6086 reads

Personal Transformation Required
"Nothing happens without "personal transformation." But at the heart of any serious effort to alter how we operate lies a concern with three dysfunctions of our culture: fragmentation, competition, and reactiveness.The word health has the same roots as "whole." Like people, organizations can get sick and die. They also need to be cured and healed. Yet, like physicians who focus only on their speci... posted on Nov 13, 4512 reads

The Spiritual Practice of Hosting Conversation
"Our policy choices flow from our politics, our politics flow from our values, and our values flow from our personal stories. If we're going to create a new politics in America and the world, we need to start at the level of story. We need to talk to each other -- and to "the other," the one we think is dead wrong. It's risky, but good hosts make such conversations so safe that people stumble past... posted on Oct 17, 2795 reads

Less Homework, More Yoga At Needham High
As the principal of Needham High School, Paul Richards is making some radical changes. Among them -- homework-free weekends and holidays, and mandatory yoga classes! It's all aimed at reducing stress. Many students were so stressed out about grades and test scores -- and so busy building résumés to get into the small number of brand-name colleges they equated with success -- that, he ... posted on Nov 1, 3018 reads

1 Slum, 7 Days, 200 New Homes
For the first time, Mona Miller has a real roof, solid walls and glass windows. Lights come on at the flick of a switch, water flows from the tap and she has the dignity of a toilet. Miller will move into her first proper home this weekend thanks to a building blitz by nearly 1,400 Irish volunteers, who completed a mission Friday to construct 200 houses in a week in the depressing, dusty -- and ho... posted on Nov 15, 1593 reads

Do-Nothing Cultivation
Masanobu Fukuoka is a towering figure in the revolutionary field of sustainable agriculture. The author of One-Straw Revolution and The Natural Way of Farming, his unconventional farming methods involve no tillage, no fertilizer, no pesticides, no weeding, no pruning, and remarkably little labor! He accomplishes all this (and high yields) by careful timing of his seeding and careful combinations o... posted on Nov 22, 2021 reads

The White Envelope Project
It's Christmas Day, and the Lawder family has one last gift for the kids, and it's the one they anticipate most every year: a plain white envelope with a note. This particular year, the note says that in the sons' honor, their parents have supported a local health clinic that provides access to physicians and necessary medical care to those who can't afford it. Everyone smiles, some through teary ... posted on Nov 26, 4376 reads

The Generous Car Salesman
Car salesmen get called a lot of things. "Living saint" is rarely one of them. And yet a Chevy dealer from Oregon just might be the exception. His name is Korry Holtzlander. "There are no bad men. There are no bad men on the planet," Holtzlander says, "There're just those who are lost." Last December, Holtzlander found a homeless man sleeping in one of the cars on his lot. But instead of giving h... posted on Nov 27, 3340 reads

Innovation of the Year: Nano Solar
Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, beca... posted on Dec 29, 2844 reads

The Wondrous Origami Man
"My friend, Gayla and I were travelling to Phoenix from Chicago. I misread the ticket, and we missed our flight. I was busy being upset about my failed plans when Gayla suggested we just fly wherever we want instead, since we had the time. I think about missing my flight to Phoenix and going to San Francisco instead. It taught me a lot about being open to what is, not attached to what I want, and ... posted on Dec 28, 3292 reads

The Art & Science of Changing Minds
Famed Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, noted for his theory of multiple intelligences, recently published Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds. The book outlines Gardner’s research and thinking on how best to convince others (or yourself) to adopt a different viewpoint in various settings, including business. In this interview Gardner talks abou... posted on Dec 30, 5114 reads

Life Lessons at Surf School
They would just sit there on the beach, every day, watching, says South African surfer Gary Kleynhans. Then, one day, he called them over. "I could see from their enthusiasm that they wanted to try," he says. "And I thought, 'Let me give these kids a go.'" And so he started free surfing classes for the street kids of this windswept beach town. Word spread fast, and six little students became 10, t... posted on Jan 8, 2131 reads

The 247 Pound Vegan
The protein-rich bounty of the football training table is supposed to grow the biggest and strongest athletes in professional sports. Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Tony Gonzalez was afraid it was going to kill him. So last year, on the eve of the biggest season of his career, Mr. Gonzalez decided to try going vegan. Could an all-star National Football League player, all 6-foot, 5-inches and 247 po... posted on May 20, 3550 reads

What The World Eats In A Week
Imagine inviting yourself to dinner with 30 different families -- in 24 countries. Imagine shopping, farming, cooking and eating with those families, taking note of every vegetable peeled, every beverage poured, every package opened. That's exactly what photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Aluisio did for their new book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. The husband-and-wife team wanted ... posted on Jan 31, 3776 reads

He's Got a Song -- and a Mission.
During the sound check before a Martin Luther King Day rally in Atlanta, the stage manager asked 8-year-old David Militello: "Just a few lines for us, okay?" David refused to say a word. He was scheduled to sing the national anthem, but wasn't in a very star-spangled mood -- which begs the question: How'd he even get this gig? "Oh, he can sing!" said Joyce Ketchie-Cann, the director of Harmony, on... posted on Feb 1, 4083 reads

Don't Hate the Media, Make Media
A change is taking place in how we communicate. Just ten years ago we all learned about the world around us from newspapers, the television, and radio. Sometimes at dinner we talk about these stories with our friends and family. But ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly with the journalists themselves. Over the last few years everything has changed. Thanks to new tools like weblo... posted on Feb 3, 2120 reads

The Good Waiter's Tip
A full scholarship to a private college for a waiter? Now that's a tip. Two years ago, Marvin Burchall was working the lunch shift at a luxury beachside hotel in his native Bermuda when he waited on an administrator from Endicott College, just north of Boston. To him, Lynn Bak was just another customer, another tourist visiting the island getaway. But Burchall's service was impeccable, and his att... posted on Feb 5, 4214 reads

Walking the World with Love & No Money
Equipped with only a few T-shirts, a bandage and spare sandals, former dotcom businessman Mark Boyle is set to cross Europe and the Middle East. On his 9,000-mile trek to Gandhi's birthplace, he will have to pick his way through war-ravaged Afghanistan. Mr Boyle, 28, said: "I will be offering my skills to people. If I get food in return, it's a bonus." He says he is part of the freeconomy movement... posted on Feb 11, 2690 reads

Successful Communities Leverage Unsung Heroes
The most effective local initiatives engage people whose informal networks reach broadly and deeply across sectors and organizations. Such people are often unsung heroes in a community. They might include a uniformed policewoman who sets up a system to link diverse services for victims of domestic violence or a bakery owner who designs training for immigrant employees in partnership with the local... posted on Feb 19, 1664 reads

Dignity Village
Pirate Steve surveyed the eccentric collection of shacks and cabins that is now his home on the outskirts of Portland. "Quite frankly, being here has been the best period of my life," he said. "Not the time when I had my sports car, my condo and my jewelery." Known as Pirate Steve because of the patch which covers an eye seriously injured in a car accident, the former laser optics technician is on... posted on Feb 23, 2916 reads

Building Communities from the Inside Out
In communities across the United States, people have rediscovered ancient wisdom about what builds strong communities, and then developed new ways to fit that wisdom to late 20th century community realities. As sources for funding community development projects have dried up, savvy organizers and leaders across the US are looking inward to identify the possible resources embedded in their own comm... posted on Feb 29, 2335 reads

The Law of Garbage Trucks
"We were driving in the right lane when, all of a sudden, a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded,and missed the other car by mere inches! The driver of the other car, the guy who almost caused a big accident, whipped his head around and started yelling bad words at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I me... posted on Mar 2, 6275 reads

Dream: Children of Calcutta
"In my next life, I would like to be a butterfly." A simple video montage begins, depicting the paintings and dreams of young students at an informal school in India run by the non-governmental organization Calcutta Rescue. Calcutta Rescue provides free education to nearly 300 slum children in that city, and here, the impetus behind the lush series of water-color paintings on display is voiced by ... posted on Mar 16, 1991 reads

The 'Do One Nice Thing' Lady
It began in the simplest way. Over lunch with girlfriends, Debbie Tenzer listened as they argued over the state of the world –- war, crime, schools in Los Angeles -– and how they felt helpless to change anything. Tenzer found herself resisting that view, and began to think what she could do. She started with small gestures of kindness one day of the week. Friends soon suggested she post these ... posted on Mar 26, 4307 reads

The Story of a Passionate Life
In a recent TED talk, Ben Dunlap beautifully tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian man he met at Wofford College. In telling Teszler's dramatic life story, which arcs from the Holocaust to the American Deep South of the 1950s, Dunlap shares some deep and, ultimately, moving lessons about justice -- and the power of lifelong learning. Ben Dunlap is a true polymath, whose talents span poetr... posted on Apr 14, 2385 reads