The Power of Play
Over the last two decades, more than 30,000 schools in the United States have eliminated recess to make more time for academics. From 1997 to 2003, children's time spent outdoors fell 50 percent, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth. Hofferth also found that the amount of time children spend in organized sports has doubled, and the number of minutes children devote each week to passive leisure,... posted on May 6, 3478 reads

Restoring The World's Coral Reefs
After witnessing the rapid devastation of a Cayman Island coral reef, Todd Barber was moved from horror to action. He gave up a six-figure salary as a marketing consultant and dedicated his life to restoring the world's ocean reef ecosystems. According to the Nature Conservancy, if the present rate of destruction continues, 70 percent of the world's coral reefs will be destroyed by the year 2050. ... posted on May 12, 2681 reads

The Security Guard's Idea
"Ten years ago, I was dissatisfied with my job working as a Vice President at a bank. Often, due to my standing as Vice President, I'd watch someone greet me respectfully but then turn around and respond dismissively to a fellow employee. In reaction to this obvious inequity, I made it a point to be even more respectful of individuals who were below me on the corporate ladder. One of these indiv... posted on May 16, 5348 reads

Memo to a Young Leader
"I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the challenges of talented young people frustrated with life inside big organizations -- game-changers who spend much of their time questioning authority. In this post, I'd like to turn the tables and address talented young people who find themselves exercising authority: leading a project team, running a product-development group, starting a new b... posted on May 19, 4975 reads

Laughter as Medicine
Laughter is the best medicine, a cliche to be sure, but a new study has shown that laughter yoga, a blend of playful laughter exercises coupled with gentle breathing and stretching, can significantly lower systolic and diastolic blood-pressure levels, as well as bring about significant reductions in the stress hormone cortisol.... posted on Dec 10, 5046 reads

Dow Jones Average of Well Being
Staying healthy and happy is a struggle for about half of Americans, according to a massive survey that attempts to measure the nation's general welfare, much like the Dow Jones Industrial Average portrays the health of the stock market. "There's never been anything quite like it," said Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences. "You're getting details about what it's like to li... posted on Jun 4, 4539 reads

Random Acts of Rebate
In June 2008 British Columbia's provincial government will mail all their Residents a $100 Climate Action Dividend, with the hope that citizens will invest the money in reducing their personal carbon usage. Polls say that most British Columbians will spend their $100 on beer or gas, but a small group of friends started pooling their Climate Action Dividends to collectively perform "Random Acts of... posted on May 30, 1789 reads

Nine Never Again's
It was his childhood dream, to travel the world. So in 2003, at the age of 25, Ludovic Hubler started. To meet local people, he chose to hitch hike and never spent a cent on traveling. Exactly five years later, he ended his journey after having visited 59 countries, sat in 1300 cars and trucks, given 300 presentations. To end his journey, he writes: "The two words that I most want to say today... posted on Jun 3, 7872 reads

Man-Made Noise
Bernie Krause listens to nature for a living. After having recorded nature for 40 years, he's noticing some alarming -- the natural sound of the world, biophony, is vanishing. Man-made noise is creeping into the most remote regions of Earth and Bernie argues that it's ruining our ecology. Animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don't interfere with one another's voices; no two species u... posted on Jun 9, 3269 reads

Green Wedding Vows
Prospective newlyweds in an Indonesian province are giving one more promise: planting trees to help slow the rapid deterioration of the country's forests. Khairul Baso and his fiancee, Andini, who received two 6-month-old teak trees along with palm, fruit and flower seedlings ahead of their wedding this weekend are one of nearly 900 couples in Gorontalo's district. Planting a tree before marriag... posted on Jun 27, 2319 reads

Practicing Spiritual Capitalism
Art DeLorenzo, a 67-year-old retired financial adviser, and I were having a hard time connecting. Several appointments we set were moved or missed, but we kept trying. Late one evening, as we settle on yet another date for our interview, DeLorenzo threw out a comment that would prove as valuable as anything he said in our hour-long phone call days later. "Wait a moment." DeLorenzo paused. "I could... posted on Jun 18, 3385 reads

Hanni's Toy Workshops in Mexico
Before muscular dystrophy took over her body, Hanni Sager was known as Toronto's Toy Lady as she amassed a first-class collection of toys from around the world, showed them in exhibitions, and gave lectures about them. But with her legs permanently fitted into braces, she had lost all hope in life. Then, one day she received what she thought was an airline advertisement and started to throw it aw... posted on Jul 2, 3285 reads

A Son's Promise to his Mother
David Fajgenbaum will not be able to give his mother flowers or a card this Mother's Day, but he is honoring her in a more profound way. Fajgenbaum's mother, Anne Marie, died of a brain tumor in 2004. A few days before her death, he promised her he would help students who also suffered with a sick loved one. The Ravenscroft High School grad has done that and more. Fajgenbaum, now a junior at Georg... posted on Jul 4, 2510 reads

The New Nobel Prizes for Science
As a boy, Fred Kavli watched the aurora borealis from his family's farm. Surrounded by the mountains and fjords of rural Norway, Kavli often contemplated the mysteries of the natural world. Even after becoming a successful entrepreneur, Kavli never stopped considering the unknown. Today, after making millions from his research into complex electronic sensors, Kavli is funding a broad range of cutt... posted on Jul 8, 3788 reads

Acts of Reconciliation
In a way, it's a story of two diamond engagement rings. Laura Waters Hinson sits in the Discovery Channel building at the Silverdocs film festival, flashing a brilliant stone on each hand, explaining how she got here. A couple of weeks ago, the 29-year-old won the top documentary prize at the Student Academy Awards in Los Angeles for "As We Forgive," her film about reconciliation in Rwanda between... posted on Jul 9, 5162 reads

Time-Shifting vs Time Management
Stephan Rechtschaffen is a pioneer in the wellness movement and the founder of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. He also leads courses on using time creatively. Unlike time-management courses which teach people how to work efficiently at an ever-accelerating pace, Rechtschaffen's basic premise is that it is crucial to learn how to "timeshift," to move smoothly from fast to medium to slow a... posted on Aug 16, 3325 reads

Empty Wallet, Full Hearts
"It seemed to be an ordinary crazy busy Saturday at the restaurant I work in. Then, all of a sudden, all the staff started turning the kitchen upside down, going through the garbage, looking and looking for something. As it turned out, a fellow server had lost her wallet full of money from the day. It was really moving to see so many people (including the caring management team) taking the time... posted on Jul 17, 3460 reads

Public Meditation Project
What would it be like to meditate in a public place--at a busy intersection or amidst teems of shoppers at a mall? A few years ago, Alex Cequea asked himself this very question, and acted on it by creating The Public Meditation Project. Convinced that world change starts from within, this young activist from Houston, Texas has since opted to "be peace" in congested locales all over town, often in ... posted on Jul 24, 2364 reads

Randy Pausch's Farewell
In his final months, while millions of people world-wide were watching his inspirational last lecture, Randy Pausch was cocooned at home in Virginia with his wife and three young children. "Every time I'm with the kids now, there's this total sense of urgency that I try not to let them pick up on," he told me. "I can't say things and reinforce them in four years. My time is now." The computer-scie... posted on Jul 26, 5131 reads

A Young Millionaire's Unique Birthday Bash
Multi-millionaire Taj Chahal has thrown himself some great birthday bashes. He has rented limos to take his friends to San Francisco. He's flown to Vegas. But this year, for his 29th birthday, Chahal decided to do something a bit different: He hosted a surprise party for 300 total strangers -- complete with birthday cake and party favors for everyone -- at Martha's Kitchen, a San Jose charity that... posted on Jul 31, 3496 reads

Sustainable Extravagance: The World as Cherry Tree
"Nature is nothing if not extravagant. Responding to unique local conditions, ants have evolved into nearly ten thousand species, several hundred of which can be found in the crown of a single Amazonian tree. Fruit trees produce thousands of blossoms -- an astonishing abundance of blossoms -- in order that another tree might germinate, take root, and grow. Over the past 150 years, however, human i... posted on Aug 14, 3503 reads

Stepping It Up For The World
Jon Warnow's passion for tackling the Earth's climate crisis was the basis for his role in Step It Up 2007. This project used the Internet to stage a highly coordinated National Day of Climate Action involving over 1400 communities in all 50 states. Every action was united by a common message "Step It Up Congress! Cut Carbon 80% by 2050." For Step It Up 2007 Jon developed and deployed the Internet... posted on Aug 3, 1669 reads

A Month Without Plastic
"I am giving up plastic for the whole of August. By this I mean not buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic. So, no take-away coffees, bottles of water or pre-packed sandwiches." A BBC Journalist takes on an experiment and in this article reflects on why she undertook it, and the challenges she faces.... posted on Aug 13, 3955 reads

No I Won't Lend You 30 Dollars But ...
In 1996, Conor Bohan stepped over the open sewers of Cite Soleil, a teeming slum on the harbor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to visit a promising former student at the Catholic high school where he was teaching. The student, Isemonde Joseph, asked Bohan if he would give her thirty dollars to attend secretarial school. He briefly considered Joseph's request, but declined. Instead, Bohan offered to spon... posted on Aug 20, 2670 reads

Listening to Failure
"Failure is the rule rather than the exception, and every failure contains information. One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you'll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what ... posted on Sep 13, 4968 reads

Dirty Car Art
Scott Wade is the Da Vinci of dirt. The artist from Wimberly, Texas loves nothing better than a dirty car. With brushes and other tools, he creates amazingly detailed images in the window dust of his car. The range of tones and detail create the look of charcoal on paper. That is, until it rains. But for Wade, the short life span of his work just adds to its power. This short video shares some of ... posted on Sep 15, 4215 reads

The Boy Who Loved Trains
Twelve-year-old John Thomas Robertson has always had an affinity for trains. "I've been into trains probably from the day I was born," said John, who's nicknamed JT. "When I was very little my grandpa got me a train set. I would just watch it go round for hours and hours." When he realized that some of his friends couldn't afford train tickets, JT saved money from bottles and cans he collected ove... posted on Sep 17, 3142 reads

The Boys of Baraka
How would the futures of four 12-year old boys change if you extracted them from their poor Baltimore neighborhood and sent them to a school 10,000 miles away in the African wilderness? The film, "The Boys of Baraka" documents this experiment, following the boys journeys in discovering the fertility of their hopes and dreams, even amidst poverty.... posted on Sep 23, 2818 reads

The Link Between Memory & Imagination
While most children can easily imagine themselves as astronauts, athletes or superheroes, make-believe might not be so easy for older generations. Recent brain imaging studies have shown that people use the same mechanisms in the brain to imagine as they do to remember, suggesting that older adults may have as much trouble imagining as they do remembering. A new study, detailed in the January issu... posted on Oct 1, 2821 reads

Pune's Unusual Doorstep Schools
72-year-old Rajni Paranjpe is helping educate hundreds of children at, of all places, various construction sites in Pune and Mumbai. Two decades ago, Paranjpe had often wondered how to educate the kids of construction workers who have to travel from one site to another with their parents. That's when she was had the idea of taking the school right to the site. Paranjpe came up with the first Door ... posted on Oct 11, 2348 reads

The Non-violent Soldier of Islam
Little known in the West is a figure named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who argued that religiously justified violence was "not God's religion." Known as Badshah Khan to his followers, the devoutly Muslim leader was called "The Frontier Gandhi" and built an Islamic parallel to Gandhi's violence-eschewing ideals of compassion for one's enemies and peaceful resistance to oppression as a means of overcoming i... posted on Nov 29, 3427 reads

The Plastic Battle
Has this ever happened to you after you've purchased a consumer item? Winner of the Friend's of the Earth Best One-minute Green Film Award, director Ulla Jackobsen from Denmark makes a simple yet dramatic statement with the help of a child and her toys. This video reminds us, in a most poignant way, to reduce, reuse, and recycle.... posted on Nov 3, 3990 reads

The Good Life For $5000 a Year
Most people monitoring the current fiscal crisis are fixated on what they could lose. Vermonter Jim Merkel is focused on what everyone could gain. After the 1989 oil spill, Jim set out on a mission to radically simplify his life. "There I was," Merkel recalls in his book, "a jet-set military salesman who voted for Reagan by day, and a bleeding-heart pacifist, eco-veggie-head-hooligan by night." ... posted on Nov 30, 5674 reads

6 Tips for Living in the Moment
We live in the age of distraction. Yet one of life's sharpest paradoxes is that our brightest future hinges on our ability to pay attention to the present. Living in the moment -- also called mindfulness -- is a state of active, open, intentional attention on the present. Mindfulness involves being with your thoughts as they are, neither grasping at them nor pushing them away. Instead of letting y... posted on Dec 2, 15240 reads

Best Friends Are Good For Business
Best friendships are good for business -- companies are coming to discover this, yet are at a loss at what to do about it. Diversity proponents worry that they have made too many strides to see it all disintegrate into the office version of high school cliques. Yet it's widely accepted that the winning companies during the next generation will be those that have employees eager to come to work and... posted on Dec 1, 2904 reads

Ivy Leaguers Play Chess With Inmates
David Wang is a young man who's clearly going places. The Princeton University sophomore is gifted with a brilliant mind, a movie-star smile and an understated self-confidence. Kelvin Washington is a middle-aged man who's not going anywhere for the next 44 years. He's a career criminal who has spent 29 years behind bars for a string of robberies and burglaries. An unlikely pairing, the two men wen... posted on Dec 3, 3742 reads

Flow: The Movie About Water
The world is running out of fresh water and the privatization of water is making it increasingly a commodity available only to the wealthy. Should water be an industry, or a basic resource available to all? This trailer for the film "Flow" poses that and other questions surrounding a resource long taken for granted.... posted on Dec 7, 6822 reads

Designing For Generosity
Internet guru Clay Shirky has a unique ability to present the chaos of the Web in stunningly clear terms, as he does in this video from Pop!Tech, documenting what a "spontaneously, self-assembling, online philanthropic venture" tells us about the nature of human motivation. Listen as he explains the concept of "designing for generosity," and what we can learn about it from the Josh Groban Foundati... posted on Dec 16, 3359 reads

The Legacy of Secret Santa
At a suburban Goodwill store on Friday, Theresa Settles selected a large, black comforter to warm her family until she can raise the money to turn the gas heat back on. A petite woman approached, her face obscured by dark sunglasses and a wrapped winter scarf, and handed Settles two $100 bills stamped with the words "secret Santa." "The only condition," she said, "is that you do something nice for... posted on Dec 23, 4238 reads

Ohio's Blind Marching Band
At the Ohio State School for the Blind in Columbus, Ohio, no one sees obstacles - especially not band director Dan Kelly. "My philosophy is - if it can't be done, let's do it anyway," he said. Not long ago, Kelly asked the kids if they'd be willing to take the school's concert band in a whole new direction. Their reactions varied from "thrilled" to "scared" to "how can blind people do this?" But n... posted on Dec 26, 3381 reads

Sara Tucholsky's First Home Run
In a small town in the middle of Washington State, in a field inside a chain linked fence, in a game fewer than a 100 people saw, a home run was hit -- not memorable for the distance it traveled or the game it decided, but for the meaning it carried. Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky had never hit a home run in her career. Central Washington senior Mallory Holtman was already her school's caree... posted on Jan 2, 3326 reads

The Science of Smiling
"My personal trainer sometimes gives me an odd piece of advice during workouts: "Relax your face." For a long time, I found this advice confusing. Isn't physical exertion supposed to be expressed in grimaces? I thought of the face as a pressure-relief valve that helps emit the pain the body is experiencing. But the trainer suggested I think about it the other way around -- that controlling the fac... posted on Jan 16, 7859 reads

Pen Pals -- Then and Now
Pen pals -- in the age of technology, chat rooms and social networking -- are slowly becoming a thing of the past. But not for the kids of two second grade classrooms, who are keeping the practice alive for a special reason. Their respective teachers met each other as pen pals nineteen years ago... posted on Jan 23, 3159 reads

Three Words of Wisdom
"One evening I was parked in front of the mall wiping off my car. I had just come from the car wash and was waiting for my wife to get out of work. Coming my way from across the parking lot was, what society would consider, a bum. From the looks of him, he had no car, no home, no clean clothes, and no money. There are times when you feel generous but there are other times that you just don't want ... posted on Jan 24, 10770 reads

20 Simple Tools for Happiness
"Happiness is ephemeral, subject to the vagaries of everything from the weather to the size of a bank account. We're not suggesting that you can reach a permanent state called "happiness" and remain there. But there are many ways to swerve off the path of anxiety, anger, frustration, and sadness into a state of happiness once or even several times throughout the day." This Reader's Digest article ... posted on Jan 26, 17156 reads

A Violinist Plays His Gratitude
The melodic strains of a violin that emanated Friday from a lobby at Barnes-Jewish Hospital carried the gratitude of a former patient who nearly lost the ability to play the instrument. "I suppose it's a way of saying 'thank you' to the hospital, but it's a lot of things." Ken Wollberg said. "It's a way to share a beautiful thing." An intense truck accident left Wollberg, a trained Viola performer... posted on Feb 2, 2683 reads

The Magic of Free Parking
Composer turned filmmaker Kurt Kuenne calls it "a fable about the magic of free parking." A short film about one parking attendant named Hugh Newman is really the story of the small acts of goodness and everyday smiles that truly make people's day, and sometimes, their lives. ... posted on Feb 3, 7474 reads

Blessings In A Backpack
On Friday afternoon, fifth grader John Gonzalez takes home more than homework. When John and his little sister meet up with their mom outside Normandy Elementary School for the quick walk home, they both carry an extra backpack -- what's inside will help sustain them through the weekend. The food, store coupons and menu are all provided free to the struggling family as part of the Blessings in a ... posted on Feb 13, 3567 reads

Another King At Gandhi's Memorial
In 1959, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to India to further understand Mahatma Gandhi's tactics of passive resistance. Gandhi's methods of nonviolent protests had worked a decade earlier to bring independence to a nation. In '59, King was in the midst of formulating and carrying out his own plan to help bring freedom and equality to the oppressed in the United States. Their legacies were for... posted on Feb 18, 3877 reads

If I Had Three Wishes
Hurrying to get out the door on a Monday morning, Kathy Smith started to scratch her name on her son's homework assignment when she stopped to read what he had written. The fourth-grade creative assignment was pretty straightforward: If I Had Three Wishes. Kathy smiled as she read the first item on her son's bucket list: a golden retriever. His second wish was to play professional basketball, hard... posted on Feb 19, 6920 reads