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 (12,842 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 (25,271 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 (28,078 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)

Before I Go, by By Paul Kalanithi - Photography by Gregg Segal
warps for a young surgeon with metastatic lung cancer In residency, there’s a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted until the operating was done, which depended, in part, on how quick you were in the OR. Time at home. Time well spent A resident’s surgical skill is judged by his technique and his speed. You can’t be sloppy and you can’t be slow. From your first wound closure onward, spend too much time being precise and the scrub tech will announce, “Looks like we’ve got a plastic surgeon on our hands!” Or say: “I get y... posted on Mar 30 2015 (66,286 reads)

Black Madonna: A Song of Forgiveness, by Gayan Macher
you want to see the brave, look to those who can return love for hatred. If you want to see the heroic, look to those who can forgive.” - The Bhagavad-Gita It was an amazing act of forgiveness, an expression of human greatness in the realm of the heart. It occurred in a courtroom in Mobile Alabama. When I read the story I wept, and set out to write a song from the inspiration I felt. Here is the story, and a link to the song it inspired—offered freely as a tribute to this unassuming mother and the beauty of forgiveness. When I read the story I wept. I felt I was in the presence of greatness, a quiet greatness of the heart. It occurred in 1981 in... posted on Mar 26 2015 (18,586 reads)

Everybody Is Good At Something: Meeting V. R. Ferose, by Nipun Mehta
is good at something. In a ServiceSpace context, that's a daily assumption -- by design. When your organizing principles forbid you to hire staff, or fundraise, or sell anything, you are happily forced to make art with the colors you've got in front of you. And as we've witnessed over the years, creative constraints like these can actually end up seeding inspiring innovations.  Last Wednesday, I met V. R. Ferose, a like-hearted artist who applied this thinking in an unlikely setting: The corporate world. In fact, a tipping point in Ferose's journey came when he published an article in Forbes. The title? Everybody is Good at Something. T... posted on May 27 2015 (28,251 reads)

14 Surprising Ways To Boost Creativity, by Ed Decker
is one of the most mysterious human qualities. Seemingly effortless for a rare few, it can be elusive for the majority. While the most extensive training in the world can’t turn an average Joe into Paul McCartney, these simple techniques can help edge the creative muse closer. 1. Limit your options.Studies show that restricting one’s choices can more effectively trigger creative thought. That’s because leaving every door open makes it difficult to focus on which way to go, while having a more specific target helps you channel your thought process. And the target doesn’t even have to be logical. Recently I was having trouble finishing a chapter of a novel... posted on Mar 23 2015 (62,427 reads)

How to Forge a Mentoring Relationship, by Patrick Cook-Deegan
mentoring carries many benefits, but it's becoming more and more rare. Here are some tips for renewing an age-old practice. When I was in high school, I had a lot of big questions. I wanted to know if it was possible to devote your life to your work without compromising your integrity. I wanted to know how to be a powerful man without being a jerk. And I could not understand why so many adults seemed to be okay with the systematic injustices that plagued my hometown. I read dozens of biographies as a teenager, in search of some answers. But for many years, I did not feel safe talking to an adult about any of this, for fear of being told I was crazy. I crave... posted on May 22 2015 (27,866 reads)

Measuring Compassion in the Body, by Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas
happens in Vagus… may make or break compassion. Is there a biological fingerprint for compassion? Two scientific teams, one led by Zoe Taylor at Purdue and the other by Jenny Stellar at UC Berkeley, have found that the answer may lie in the Vagus nerve. That’s the cranial nerve in the body with the widest reach, influencing speech, head positioning, digestion, and—importantly for these two studies—the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system’s influence on the heart. Students typically memorize the parasympathetic branch (PNS) as the “rest and digest” branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls bodi... posted on May 19 2015 (13,529 reads)

These Gorgeous Photographs Show Indigenous Americans Without the Stereotypes, by Natasha Donovan
years ago, Matika Wilbur set out on an ambitious undertaking: a vast road trip across America to photograph members of all 562 of America’s federally-recognized tribes. Matika Wilbur, Darkfeather, Bibiana and Eckos Ancheta (Tulalip), 2014. Inkjet print 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Images of Native Americans made by non-Natives have a problematic history. During the 19th and early 20th centu­ries, ethnographers often used photos to document and romanticize the last traces of the New World’s “dying cul­tures.” Native Americans survived, but the tradition lives on: Posed images and media stereotypes continue to reduce indigenous peoples... posted on Sep 11 2015 (14,884 reads)

South Africa: From Dropouts to Innovators, by Ashoka
founded by Marlon Parker, is an innovation movement that transforms youth in troubled communities, gangsters, dropouts and ex-convicts, into changemakers. In this blog we look at how RLabs invests in young "problem experts" to beat crime & unemployment. "It works because RLabs is a movement by people for people." Marlon Parker grew up in the Cape Flats township of Cape Town, surrounded by increasing rates of unemployment, crime, gang violence and drug abuse. As the eldest in a single-parent household, Marlon was compelled to supplement the family's income and by age eight he was selling candy and carrying grocery bags to e... posted on Apr 20 2015 (173,350 reads)

Pay-As-You-Feel Cafe Feeds Thousands on Food Waste, by Cat Johnson
Smith knows food. A trained chef who has worked in numerous restaurants, the 29-year old also knows firsthand how much perfectly good food is wasted. Smith hails from Leeds, England, but it was a year spent working on farms in Australia that inspired The Real Junk Food Project (TRJFP), which changed the direction of his life. A pay-as-you-feel cafe model, TRJFP intercepts food headed for the landfill and turns it into restaurant-quality meals. As Smith tells it, all the downtime on sunny Australian beaches got him thinking about his life—what he had done so far and what he envisioned for the future. He realized he wanted to do something that would make a positive difference... posted on May 3 2015 (121,201 reads)

Young Entrepreneur Promotes Gifting to Heal His Cancer and Society, by Mira Luna
has published many stories about the gift economy and living without money. While they're often inspiring and popular, they often bring up fear of survival. People ask, “Is this really possible for ME?” or “Will I become homeless or sick and die from poverty?” Personally, I've questioned whether living in the gift economy is realistic only for privileged, healthy people. And so I tracked down Brice Royer for an interview. Brice is a young, now voluntarily unemployed entrepreneur from Vancouver with stomach cancer. He not only depends on gift exchange to survive, but helps other people survive through the gift and prosthelytizes gift culture with... posted on May 25 2015 (23,290 reads)