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

You Gotta Have Art
As health-care costs skyrocket, a down-to-earth approach to healing is emerging, complementing high-tech medicine with high-touch arts. The approach is based on the assumption that incorporating music, visual art, writing and performance into clinical care can increase feelings of well-being and even improve health -- an assumption that medical researchers are beginning to recognize the need to te... posted on Apr 10, 1413 reads

Listening to People
"The effectiveness of the spoken word," say Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens, "hinges not so much on how people talk but mostly on how they listen." In this article in the Harvard Business Review, Listening to People, they open up a subject of tremendous practical importance. We have assumed that learning to read will automatically teach one to listen. While some of the skills attained thro... posted on Apr 27, 6061 reads

A 9-Year-Old Walks For The Homeless
Younger than most of the people in the crowd, 9-year-old Zach Bonner stepped to the side of the lectern so that people could see him. He thanked sponsors of his 250-mile walk for the homeless, which was about to start. "What bothers me is what homeless kids go through," Zach said. "What happens when they go to sleep? What happens when they wake up?" His family doesn't know why Zach works so hard o... posted on Apr 18, 3544 reads

Uniting the World One Swoosh At A Time
Noel had quit his job as a valet parking attendant in Las Vegas; Angelina had given up her gig as a cocktail waitress. In 2001, the Andreonis embarked on an unusual adventure. They decided that they would be governed by three passions: travel, photography and basketball. Nearly seven years later, the Andreonis have traveled far beyond their beginnings. They have visited 28 countries and all 50 US ... posted on Apr 24, 2572 reads

Redemptive Power of Music & Friendship
Three years ago, journalist Steve Lopez met a homeless musician on skid row in Los Angeles. Lopez learned that the man, Nathaniel Ayers, had once been a promising violinist, and that he had left the prestigious Juilliard School because of his struggle with mental illness. Lopez developed a friendship with Ayers, eventually helping him to get off the street, settle into an apartment and find treatm... posted on Apr 30, 3231 reads

Where Does Creativity Hide
Born in the US to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother's expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead. Her much-loved, best-selling novels have been translated into 35 languages. In this TED talk Tan digs deep into the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history and into the worlds of physics and chance... posted on May 1, 17103 reads

Becoming A Creature of New Habits
"Habits are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word "habit" carries a negative connotation. So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously... posted on May 7, 5504 reads

Films For the World, By the World
Over a span of four hours today -- on Saturday, May 10th 2008 -- twenty-four short films made "by the world, for the word" will be broadcast on television and transmitted over the internet and to cell phones everywhere. Welcome to Pangea Day. "In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference and conflict," the event's creators say, "it's easy to lose sight of what we have in common... posted on May 10, 2196 reads

The Pep Talk of a Lifetime
Moments before an important competition, a young swimmer turns to her coach in a moment of doubt. "As most athletes know, when you have time to sit and think about what you need to do, you start to get nervous. That is exactly what I was beginning to do; only it wasn’t the good kind of nerves that get you psyched up—it was the bad kind that made you want to sit in a corner and hide. Knowing t... posted on May 11, 7867 reads

The Healing Power of Portraits
On the fourth floor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, they're doing cutting-edge research on bladder cancer, the mechanics of cancer stem-cell replication, and the healing power of portraits. That's right, portraits. The aim of the project is for an artist to study the interaction between patients and caregivers and to develop a set of paintings based on observation. The work ... posted on May 13, 2846 reads

Top 10 Tips from Gandhi's Words
A 27 year old student from Sweden, Henrik Edberg, shares "Gandhi's top ten fundamentals for changing the world": Change yourself. You are in control. Forgive and let it go. Without action you aren’t going anywhere. Take care of this moment. Everyone is human. Persist. See the good in people and help them. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self. Continue to grow and evolve. The full artic... posted on May 15, 10411 reads

The B Corporation
Mike Hannigan and Sean Marx started a company with an unusual mission: donate all profits to charity. As they grew to sales of more than $26 million, Hannigan and Marx often wished for additional capital to help fuel that growth but stayed away from outside investors for fear of undermining their philanthropic mission. Now, they've found a solution to their dilemma -- writing their values into th... posted on May 21, 4193 reads

Rwanda's Weapon of Mass Construction
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda left the country in tatters, its future fraught with uncertainty. Of the more than 800,000 people killed, most were men and boys. Rwanda's remaining population was 70 percent female. Fast-forward to the present day: The economy has revived and is holding steady. Major road arteries between cities and outlying villages, which were destroyed, have been rebuilt. Today, the... posted on May 23, 3020 reads

A Meal with 30 Families in 24 Countries
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. Well, that's exactly what photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Aluisio did to explore the impact of globalization, migration and rising affluence on the d... posted on May 24, 2514 reads

Science of Subtle Signals
When MIT's Media Lab team studied one of the largest's providers of call center outsourcing, they found something curious that helped them predict the success or failure of almost every call -- within just a few second of the call! And oddly enough, they studied neither the specific words that the operators used nor the logic of their conversations, but only the physical voice signal: the measur... posted on May 31, 3243 reads

Work When You Want, Where You Want?
Picture an office where no meeting is mandatory and employees can come and go as they please as long as they get the job done. "Too good to be true," most cubicle occupants would probably say, but new research shows that such an empowering work environment can be more than fiction. Best Buy, for example, gave 3,000 of its corporate staffers a chance to work without micro supervision and producti... posted on Jun 6, 5385 reads

Zero-Emission Car
Honda has announced the release of their new Clarity hydrogen fuel cell car and refueling station. The FCX Clarity was designed to be a fuel cell vehicle that runs on electricity powered by hydrogen, and emits only water vapor and heat into the air. Due to a lack of public refueling stations, the car will be piloted by a few Californians in summer of 2008. However, Honda is developing The Home En... posted on Jun 7, 3310 reads

A Millionaire Still Living in a Hut
When 27-year old Sarathbabu graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, he created quite a stir by refusing a job that offered him a huge salary. He preferred to start his own enterprise, inspired by his mother who once sold idlis (rice cakes) on the pavements of Chennai, to educate him and his 4 siblings. Brought up in the slums, Sarathbabu knew what it was like to... posted on Jun 10, 5884 reads

The Plastic Planet
An estimated one percent of thrown-away plastic bags never make it to the landfill. Instead, too many of them become street litter which first gets washed into the city's storm drains and then, when a heavy rain comes and the system overflows, gets dumped through one of the harbor estuaries. From there they head straight to the ocean where they could become accidental food for the 7 species of sea... posted on Jun 20, 2508 reads

The 12-Year-Old Teacher
At a recent tutoring session, Michael moved between the laptops used by shelter residents Alicia Lewis and Heaven Sanders, both 7. He coached them for 30 minutes on typing their names, then switched to a half hour of vocabulary and math games. "Michael, I'm lost," Heaven said, resting her face on her hands. He quickly went to her computer and punched the "load" button on the keyboard to get the so... posted on Jun 16, 4096 reads

Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution
How does economic growth happen -- from a strategic point of view? Joseph Schumpeter argued that growth happens through a process of creative destruction. But creative destruction has two sides -- the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff sharpen. How can we avoid this tradeoff and how do we begin reorgan... posted on Jun 29, 2268 reads

Letters To A Young Teacher
For more than forty years, Jonathan Kozol has taught in, worked with, and written about America's inner city public schools. His straight talk in best-selling books such as Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace has made him a hero of many teachers, and he fiercely opposes policies he believes perpetuate educational inequities. In Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol writes a series of personal letter... posted on Jul 1, 4179 reads

What Business Execs Should Know About Non-Profits
Business leaders play vital roles in the nonprofit sector – as board members, donors, partners, and even executives. Yet all too often they underestimate the unique challenges of managing nonprofit organizations. In this article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, 11 executives who have played leadership roles in both for-profits and nonprofits reveal the critical differences between the... posted on Jul 15, 3570 reads

Selling 1 House to Serve 30 Villages
One day while driving with her father, Hannah Salwen noticed a Mercedes stopped next to a homeless man sitting on the curb. "I said to my dad, 'If that guy didn't have such a nice car, then that guy could have a nice meal,'" the 15-year-old from Atlanta, recalled. And so began the tale of what the Salwen family calls "Hannah's Lunchbox." The family began seriously thinking through what they actua... posted on Jul 10, 3209 reads

Mildred Norman's Simple Message
In the summer of 1952 Mildred Norman, traveling alone, hiked the entire length of the 2050 mile-long Appalachian Trail. She was the first woman to accomplish this feat. It turned out to be a practice run. From 1953 until 1981, she walked more than 25,000 miles across the United States , bearing the simplest of messages: this is the way of peace --overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, ... posted on Jul 19, 3265 reads

Peace, Love and Ice Cream
Matt Allen,won't disclose his age but must hover around 30. He finds happiness in life's small wonders. He plays kickball; he does the happy dance. With free-flowing floppy hair and thrift-store threads, he resembles an elementary student allowed to pick his own outfit for the day. Matt Allen is not just an ice cream man, he's "The" Ice Cream Man. And his venture, meanwhile, has grown from a one-m... posted on Jul 23, 3986 reads

Little Boy, Big Mountain
Although no one said it out loud, it was clear the first day that 7-year-old Keats Boyd would probably not make it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. At just four feet tall, the kid could barely conquer a fallen log. There was just no way he was going to make it all the way up Africa's tallest mountain. That was obvious to everyone ... except for Keats. The boy doesn't come from a mountain-climbing... posted on Aug 2, 3376 reads

What Leaders Should Know About Followers
There is no leader without at least one follower -- that's obvious. Yet the modern leadership industry, now a quarter-century old, is built on the proposition that leaders matter a great deal and followers hardly at all. Most of the limited research and writing on subordinates has tended to either explain their behavior in the context of leaders' development rather than followers' or mistakenly as... posted on Aug 4, 3577 reads

29-Day Giving Challenge
Feeling desperate and hopeless after spending eight days in the hospital related to multiple sclerosis, 35-year-old Cami Walker, decided to take an odd "prescription" from an African medicine woman. The remedy? Give away one thing each day for 29 days. "I thought the suggestion was crazy at first, but decided it wasn't going to hurt me to try it. Things couldn't get much worse," said Walker. "I wa... posted on Aug 19, 3895 reads

Why Social Capital Matters
"The one thing I've consistently seen entrepreneurs do that has significant measurable impact on everything they do -- more than any other factor -- is manage their relationships and manage their social capital. Folks that do that really well are bound to find some measure of success in some area of their life. It may not be the course they set initially, but there's invariably some positive that ... posted on Sep 16, 2778 reads

Singing For Supper
Three young men having been walking across Britain without any money, camping out and relying on the kindness of strangers to survive. Calling themselves "singing adventurers", they have taken three major trips in the past three years, sleeping wherever they can and foraging for food. They sing three-part folk songs, ancient and modern, wherever they are welcomed. They "busk in heaving towns, chan... posted on Nov 19, 2815 reads

16-year-Old Sails Solo Around the World
Michael Perham, 16, is the youngest person to have sailed across the Atlantic alone. He set out on his latest voyage from Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth, on Saturday morning. He will be alone at sea for over four months and his only contact with family will be through satellite link-ups. Michael said: "I'm a little bit nervous but otherwise really, really excited. "It's just the feeling of being compl... posted on Nov 20, 2221 reads

Now Nature Has Its Own Rights, in Ecuador!
There was a time when people were considered property and this idea is quickly being antiquated. But now, Ecuador has taken a revolutionary step -- by codifying it in its Constitution -- of granting rights to Nature! Ecuador's constitution grants nature the right to "integral restoration" and says that the state "will promote respect toward all the elements that form an ecosystem" and that the st... posted on Nov 22, 2165 reads

A Surprise Bouquet For A Stranger
"My cousin Heidi was stricken around age 16 with a debilitating disease, which took her life about 20 years later. As the disease progressed, she became wheelchair bound and unable to easily communicate (I'm not sure of the disease -- it may have been a combination, including Parkinson's).When she was in her late 20's, she would often have her mother take her out into the front yard when the weath... posted on Nov 24, 5324 reads

An Author Turned Visionary Humanitarian
After the runaway success of his Pulitzer-nominated memoir, literary wunderkind Dave Eggers could have settled into a comfortable career cranking out similar material. Instead he took a more dynamic path. He founded the small indie publishing empire McSweeney's, which produces the Believer magazine, and started two nonprofit enterprises with a humanitarian bent: 826 Valencia, a writing and tutorin... posted on Dec 18, 2397 reads

Eight Strategies for Healing
Illness is an unavoidable part of life, but our bodies want to heal. And we can help them do that, despite the obstacles. Each of us possesses a surprising capacity to bounce back from illness and injury, under the right conditions, and the body will work hard on its own to help the recovery -- even if we do little to help the process along. That said, there are specific steps to help the process... posted on Dec 20, 8355 reads

Japanese City Finds Treasure in Trash
Many small pieces can add up to a big whole, and one small city in the north of Japan is finding there's money in the process as well. Odate, a city of about 80,000 people in Akita Prefecture, on the northern end of Honshu, the big island of Japan, has begun diverting small electronics from landfills and using the town's mining history to salvage precious metals from the waste. By putting collecti... posted on Dec 31, 2739 reads

How Your Vocabulary Can Feed The Hungry
What if just knowing what a word meant could help feed hungry people around the world? Well, at website called FreeRice it does. Go to the site, and you'll see a word and four definitions. Choose the right meaning and the site's advertisers will donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency that is the world's largest humanitarian organization. Keep on guessing (the q... posted on Jan 9, 5906 reads

The Solidarity Quilt
In 2004, The World March of Women, an international network of 6,000 grassroots women's organizations, created a global charter for humanity, an official statement of the group's goals. In 31 affirmations, the charter calls on men, women and oppressed groups across the planet to "transform the world," "radically change social structures" and live together with "equality, peace, freedom, solidarity... posted on Jan 17, 3431 reads

The Secret Life of Paper
There is no "papering over" the problem of paper. American families use the most pulp products and in the process are chopping down forests, polluting the air in the paper manufacture process and creating methane gas in landfills. Paper recycling is taking hold, and will grow stronger as consumers opt for recycled packaging. Even easier, when you spill something, use a sponge and not a paper towel... posted on Jan 29, 3390 reads