Moral Courage & The Story of Sister Megan Rice, by Michael Edwards
remain in prison for the rest of my life is the greatest honor you could give me: the story of Sister Megan Rice Where does moral courage come from - the energy and strength to challenge and transform much larger powers? A prison correspondence provides some answers. Credit:http://climateviewer.com. All rights reserved. The Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oakridge, Tennessee, is supposed to be impregnable. But on July 28th2012, an 84 year-old nun called Sister Megan Rice broke through a series of high-security fences surrounding the plant and reached a uranium storage bunker at the center of the complex. She was accompanied by Greg Boertje-Obed (57) and Michael Walli (63).... posted on Oct 1 2014 (34,176 reads)

From Silos To Solution EcoSystems, by William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan
couple of weeks ago, pianist Jonathan Biss was set to teach an online course on Beethoven’s Sonatas. A whopping 32,000 people signed up for the course when it went live, leaving Biss—who expected a mere 1000—astonished. Aptly named, Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs, are just one of the many forces redefining education as we know it. Whether it’s taking a refresher on linear algebra through Khan Academy; mastering the basics of computer programming with CodeAcademy; or pursuing actual course credit from online, for-profit institutions such as StraighterLine or the University of Phoenix, millions now draw from a rich array of educational resources. And ... posted on Oct 27 2014 (11,664 reads)

The Compassionate Instinct, by Dacher Keltner
humans are born selfish? Think again. Dacher Keltner reveals the compassionate side to human nature. Humans are selfish. It’s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good. These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the ... posted on Nov 5 2014 (22,749 reads)

Sherwin Nuland on the Art of Dying as a Lens on the Art of Living Meaningfully, by Maria Popova
greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it.” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” Montaigne wrote in his timeless meditation on death and the art of living. And yet in the half millennium since his day, we’ve made paltry progress on coming to such nonchalant terms with the reality of death. We are stillprofoundly unprepared when it strikes our loved ones and paralyzed by the prospect of our own demise. Our discomfort with “the idea of a permanent unconsciousness in which there is neither void nor vacuum... posted on Nov 3 2014 (24,972 reads)

Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella, by Kristijojedlicki
Credit: Pinterest Recently, I have felt like I live in Seattle instead of Louisville, thanks to the rainier than usual weather. While the rain has put a damper on some outdoor activities, it hasn’t washed out one of my favorite weekday morning rituals. Nearly every morning when I arrive at work, which happens to be at a day shelter for homeless men, I am greeted warmly by some of the finest gentlemen in all of Louisville. It is one of these gentlemen who refused to let the morning rain showers dampen his spirits or mine. James used to be a frequent guest at the day shelter, and he quickly earned a special place in my heart, due to his twinkling eyes, shy smi... posted on Dec 8 2014 (23,226 reads)

Folding up the map, by Snigdha Manickavel
knew that one day maps would become obsolete, unwanted, unloved, languishing under piles of telephone books, VCRs and reams of writing paper? To unfold a map is to unfold adventure. Listen carefully as you smooth out those well-worn creases and you will hear the snapping of sails over a perfect blue ocean. Close your eyes and you will feel the steady, increasing rhythm of a train leaving the station. Your map is your ticket. To sit before an unfolded map, tracing out uneven lines of untouched road, is to feel small and humble. This world is large, barely knowable, our time here already running out. I have loved maps since I was a little girl and my days were fil... posted on Nov 11 2014 (23,574 reads)

So Much Magic around the Garden, by Michael K. Stone
do you want to work here?" asked Cleveland Elementary School's principal, interviewing Mary Schriner for a position as a special education kindergarten teacher at the Oakland, California school. "Because your school looks like a prison yard, and I'd like to change that," said Schriner. Six years later, Cleveland sports six lovely gardens that serve as real-world classrooms, an ecoliteracy program for all students, community support and recognition, and student research projects that are making tangible changes in the district food program. For 2010-2011, Cleveland was chosen to serve as a pilot school within a suite of "iconic projects" ... posted on Dec 27 2014 (32,433 reads)

Habits of Successful People: Start Before You Feel Ready, by James Clear
1966, a dyslexic sixteen-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first record store the next year. After two years of selling records, he decided to open his own record label and recording studio. He rented the recording studio out to local artists, including one na... posted on Jun 25 2015 (24,574 reads)

Habits of Heart & Mind in Leadership, by Zenobia Barlow
address to the graduates of the 2009–2010 Center for Ecoliteracy Schooling for Sustainability Leadership Academy. Over the spring break, we hosted a student-organized class on food systems from a prestigious university. The students, among the nation's best and brightest, crowded into our meeting room to discuss their research about our participation in the Food Systems Project, Berkeley School Lunch Initiative, and Rethinking School Lunch. We spoke to them about creating models of schooling for sustainability, and then they peppered us with questions. We were increasingly incredulous in that virtually every question they posed posited a false dichotomy. They want... posted on Nov 17 2014 (17,141 reads)

A 19-Year-Old's Book Of Untranslatable Words, by Maptia, Co-founder Team
year Maptia.com published a blog post titled ‘11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures’ with illustrations by Ella Sanders, who was interning with them last summer in Morocco. The next morning they woke to a torrent of emails and tweets from thousands upon thousands of people who had commented, shared, or volunteered more suggestions for these untranslatables. We’ll let Ella share the story of what happened next... JONNY (co-founder at Maptia): Hi Ella! Wow, where to even begin... 400 days ago you were interning with us out in Morocco and today you are are holding your very own book that has just been published with Random House, 48 hours before you... posted on May 10 2021 (47,982 reads)

Poems To Color In, by Ellie Cross
I first moved to India from the United States, I was incredibly fortunate to stumble upon an inspiring group of people who come together on Tuesdays for something called "Stone Soup Adda."  Inspired by Awakin Mumbai meditation circles, the Tuesday gatherings were started by a couple in Mumbai who had the space to welcome people into their house for an evening of sharing.   The meetings were based on the popular folktale of "Stone Soup" that tells the story of a hungry visitor to a village who notices that the villagers seldom spend time together or share anything among themselves, let alone with visiting strangers. The visitor has an idea ... posted on Dec 16 2014 (103,913 reads)

An Open Letter to the Children, by Randall Amster
Children, I know that this world must often seem confusing to you. It's noisy, dirty and filled with adults scurrying about their busy lives without noticing you all that much sometimes. It's filled with rules and people telling you what to do, mostly without asking what you want to do. It's also a world where adults teach you about all of the dangers around you, but not as much about the wonderful, beautiful things. You see, things weren't quite like this when we were kids. We had our rules and dangers, to be sure, but nothing like the ones you face today. Back then (which is not really that long ago), people talked to each other more, neighbors knew one... posted on Dec 14 2014 (24,044 reads)

"Forgiveness Is Liberating": Desmond Tutu On Healing A Nation's Racist Past, by Desmond Tutu
1997, he asked: "Who could have thought we would ever be an example, except of awfulness; who could ever have thought we would be held up as a model to the rest of the world?" Today, South Africa's healing process is a beacon of hope for the United States. Photo by Joshua Wanyama Editor’s note: Last week, YES! published an article by Fania Davis, director of a restorative justice center and sister of civil rights activist Angela Davis, called “This Country Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Process on Violence Against African Americans—Right Now.” In light of the recent refusal to indict police officers in the killings of both Mik... posted on Apr 3 2015 (12,843 reads)

The Difference Between Education and Training, by Rachel Naomi Remen
me, the process of education is intimately related to the process of healing. The root word of education -- educare -- means to lead forth a hidden wholeness in another person. A genuine education fosters self-knowledge, self-trust, creativity and the full expression of one’s unique identity. It gives people the courage to be more. Yet over the years so many health professionals have told me that they feel personally wounded by their experience of professional school and profoundly diminished by it. This was my experience as well.  It has made me wonder. Perhaps what we have all experienced is not an education at all but a training, which is something qu... posted on Jan 28 2015 (35,508 reads)

Breaking Bread and Healing Hearts One Dinner Party at a Time, by COURTNEY E. MARTIN
Flowers’ mom was diagnosed with lung cancer when she was a senior in high school. This sparkplug of a young woman with a dark, pixie haircut and big, bright eyes abandoned her big dreams to go to NYU and become an actor and instead enrolled at the University of North Carolina so she could be close to home. Though she was surrounded by a community of friends, she rarely brought up her mom. “I became good at not talking about what was happening to me,” she explains. “I got really, really good at being really, really busy.” When her mother died during her senior year in college, many of Lennon’s friends hadn’t even known she was sick. In pa... posted on Feb 9 2015 (11,802 reads)

Nicholas Kristof's 'Path' to More Effective Giving, by Knowledge@Wharton
deciding how to use your time and money to address the world’s problems, you may struggle with how to use those resources for the greater good. Exploring that challenge is the subject of the new book A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, written by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. Wharton management professor Adam M. Grant recently interviewed Kristof about his new book when he visited campus as a guest lecturer in the Authors@Wharton series. In this interview, Kristof discusses how to address “the greatest inequality of all … inequality of opportunity.” An edited transcript of the conversa... posted on Sep 26 2015 (12,508 reads)

Spirit Horse: Helping Children With Disabilities Soar, by encore.org
a telecom exec, he has created a global network of therapeutic riding centers serving children with disabilities – free of charge. Watch a video about Charles Fletcher: Two tumultuous decades in the telecommunications industry took a toll on Charles Fletcher’s income and his spirit. When he retired in the 1990s at the age of 58, he found some peace of mind through volunteering at a Dallas-area equine therapy center for children with disabilities. The special connection he witnessed between the children and horses was both restorative and intimately familiar, as he had been around horses since he was five. But Fletcher thought the program was falling short. It... posted on Feb 19 2015 (25,272 reads)

Where To Start On Empathy? 5 Essential Reads, by Nathan Wiltshire
the last few years, ‘empathy’ has taken over my life. The fascination with human understanding has become a deep running passion as the result of many long hours of research, countless exhilarating discussions, and increasing experimentations seeking new ways to apply empathy in business, education, social programs, and public policy. At first it was extremely challenging to grasp, with a holistic view of empathy covering fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, biology, psychology and innovation (to name a few). Adding to my beginner’s confusion was a lack of coherent definition for empathy – the term has almost as many descri... posted on Feb 23 2015 (28,079 reads)

Ecosophy: Nature's Guide to a Better World, by Elisabet Sahtouris
Prohm Temple, Angkor, Cambodia Storytelling The most exciting and beneficial things I believe happened to humanity in the past century were physicists’ recognition that “the universe is more like a great thought than like a great machine” and astronauts lifting far enough from Earth to see, feel and show us how very much alive our planet is. Those events led to a wonderful sea change from the older - and rather depressing - scientific story of a non-living material universe accidentally giving rise to all within it, devoid of meaning or purpose. The new view, revealing a conscious universe and a living Earth in whic... posted on Feb 26 2015 (22,551 reads)

A Baltimore Public School Teacher Explains Why It Pays to Put Kids in Control, by Andy Lee Roth
do Shakespeare’s plays tell us about how to run classrooms in an unequal society? The school as factory was a predominant metaphor for education in the middle of the last century. Schools were to churn out young people ready for roles as workers and consumers. In current debates, the laboratory is the model, with successful education defined as controlling variables to produce desired outcomes. In Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty, Jay Gillen, a Baltimore public school teacher, vividly shows the limitations of both models. In each, authorities define successful outcomes in ways that reduce learning to a matter o... posted on Mar 10 2015 (15,676 reads)