Inspirational Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Inspirational Media Articles in Major Media
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The West African nation of Ivory Coast ... has navigated through two civil wars so far in this century. And it struggles with widespread poverty. Despite all that, it stands out in Africa for its economic progress. Growth in its gross domestic product has lately been 6% to 7% a year. Inflation is low at about 4%. Most of all, it has seen a one-third decline in the percentage of Ivorians living below the poverty line. An underlying cause is an effort by religious and political leaders to build social trust. Interfaith initiatives are frequent. Organizations quickly address misinformation or grievances at the community level to avert wider conflagration. A Christian-Muslim dialogue in January called on "all citizens to promote messages of peace, fraternity, and unity." President Alassane Ouattara himself seems inclined toward pragmatic peacemaking. He took office amid violence that erupted after former President Laurent Gbagbo vehemently contested Mr. Ouattara's 2010 electoral victory. More than 3,000 people died in that civil war, fueled by politicization over a concept of nationality that excludes a large portion of the population. Mr. Ouattara's programs on infrastructure, jobs, and land tenure have targeted previously ignored northern regions susceptible to extremism. But now they're expanding. Other projects aim to serve and "reintegrate" youth. The nation's ranking in a global corruption index continues to improve. Regional and local elections have become more credible.
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Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called. They weren't there for books. They came to shop for groceries. Connected to the [Enoch Pratt Library], the brightly painted market space is small but doesn't feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a cafĂ©. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods. On any given day, there's a range of produce, like collard greens, apples, onions, radishes, potatoes, and cherry tomatoes, plus eggs, orange juice, rice, bread, and treats like cookies and peanut butter crackers. As they exited, shoppers did not need to pull out their wallets: No one pays at Pratt Free Market. Launched in the fall of 2024, Pratt Free Market opens its doors every Wednesday and Friday and serves around 200 people per day. Anyone can pick up food at the store without providing identification or meeting income requirements. For Baltimore residents, 28 percent reported experiencing food insecurity last year–twice the national average. Pratt Free Market ... offers a mix of everything–from healthy, fresh produce to sweets. And every fourth Friday, the marker turns into "Pantry on the Go!", a farmers' market-style setup outside the library that offers fruits and vegetables. Last month ... they handed out onions, sweet potatoes, watermelons, celery, and apples.
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A pavilion of towering windows in a Mexico City urban park is nearly packed. Everyone here wants the same thing: to dance freely, at no cost, without harassment or prejudice. Twenty-somethings, children with their mothers, teenagers and elderly couples gather around the disc jockey's console. "This is an open invitation for everyone to move as they wish in a safe space!" said Axel MartĂnez, one of the collective's founders, as he grabs a microphone and cheers the revelers on. At their own pace, each person is carried away by the music – and no one seems surprised by the moves of others. From experimental jazz pieces and smooth Egyptian hip-hop to the more familiar pulse of cumbias grooved with an electronic touch, people dance to it all. The party was organized by the Nueva Red de Bailadores or NRB (New Network of Dancers), a collective that aims to create spaces where people can gather to dance freely. There's no cover charge, no booze, and no pressure to do the "right" moves. As organizers pointed out, their parties forgo police and security, fostering a sense of collective care where attendees look out for one another. Isabel Miraflores, a 73-year-old retired high school assistant principal, came with her husband and said she enjoyed both the dancing and the presence of people of different ages. "I think it's wonderful because it's a free event," she said. "We get together with people from all parts of society and we have fun without any trouble."
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She has been at the bedside of over 1,000 people globally in their last moments of life–from her home in the U.S. to Thailand and Zimbabwe. O'Brien, a registered nurse, had an impulse to move into hospice care over two decades ago and has since worked as an oncology nurse and a death doula, supporting those at the end of life. O'Brien's recent book, The Good Death, aims to normalize the realities of death and the need to plan for the end. At the end of life, many people share what they didn't do but knew they always wanted to do, O'Brien says."We all are here for a purpose, and we all have gifts, and when we don't share them and act upon those, that's where the huge regret comes," O'Brien says. Not "dipping into the unknown" or trying something new is a factor of having an abundance mindset, she says. When we consider our time sacred and limited, we are less afraid to take action on something that may excite us. "One of the things we don't know is how many days we have," she says. "When you get that feeling, or you have something that you want to do, don't let your ego, the fear part of you, shut it down." Many people at the end of life regret not being vulnerable enough to let themselves be loved and give love. They often share that they could not reach a level of forgiveness with someone else or themselves, O'Brien says. It's essential to extend ourselves grace, know when to take ownership, and release guilt, she says. O'Brien encourages patients to envision the time they're struggling to let go of and ask themselves if they did what they could in the moment with the information and resources they had.
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In Cape Cod, Massachusetts ... hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So [John] Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. Next to the lagoons, he assembled a line of 15 clear-sided fiberglass tanks, each about the height of a person, and filled them with water containing all the different life forms he could find from local ponds, marshes and streams – plants, bugs, bacteria, fungi, general gunk. The water could be pumped from one tank to the next, and the living matter inside them soon organised itself into a series of different ecosystems. Todd found that he could put in polluted water from the lagoons at one end of the line of tanks and by the time it came out the other end, 10 days later, it was clean enough to drink. "To see that water, and to see all the organisms in the tanks, including fishes, looking and being so healthy, I was just amazed," he says. Todd ... would later discover that various microorganisms were finding uses for the toxins and heavy metals. Todd calls it "biological intelligence". Todd christened his invention the "eco-machine", and spent the next four decades ... applying it to everything from treating wastewater to growing food to repairing damaged ecosystems. Todd founded his own ecological consultancy, Ocean Arks International. It has designed and built more than 100 eco-machine systems to treat problems of pollution, wastewater and food production around the world, from the US to China, Australia, Brazil and Scotland. Todd's eco-machines are cheaper and more effective than industrial alternatives ... and are even capable of treating chemicals that have been impossible to break down using conventional methods, such as grades of crude oil and mining waste. They are also far more sustainable – powered almost entirely by sunlight.
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Since the Israel-Hamas war, relationships between some students have been nowhere near brotherly, let alone collegial. Some students just aren't accustomed to contrary or controversial ideas and believe that even hearing them is harmful. What hasn't made headline news is the spike in civil discourse initiatives at campuses. Here's one gauge. At the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, a coalition of College Presidents for Civic Preparedness went from a handful of participants prior to Oct. 7, 2023, to well over 100 afterward. The likes of Harvard, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have launched civil discourse initiatives since the deadly Hamas attack that sparked the Israeli invasion of Gaza. One success story is the Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy (DID) Lab at Providence College in Rhode Island, run by Dr. Bevely and Professor Nick Longo. "With Mutual Respect" events feature two people on opposing sides of an issue. Panelists don't so much debate as endeavor to foster mutual understanding. In December 2020, Vanderbilt [University's] women's basketball team elected to protest for racial justice by staying inside the locker room during the national anthem. Vanderbilt ... facilitated structured dialogue between the basketball players and military veterans on the Nashville, Tennessee, campus. Some athletes shared experiences of racism and discrimination. Young men and women, some of whom had combat experience, explained why they felt so strongly about serving their country. The culture of civil discourse needs to be rooted in a relationship of trust. "If as a student, I'm challenging something, or I say something controversial, I'm going to have to trust you that you're not excluding me," says [Chancellor] Dr. Diermeier.
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Perhaps you're in hospital recovering from surgery, as I was only a little time ago. When a friend arrived with a posy of flowers, I found myself smiling for the first time since leaving home. More than ever, we could all use some green relief, as we deal with a world that seems to only grow more anxiety-inducing and uncertain. In most cultures throughout history, medicine and botany have been closely entwined, and gardens have been associated with healing the body, mind, and spirit. Inevitably, the creep of urbanisation saw the garden landscapes of [healing] institutions greatly reduced. There has been a trend towards banning flowers from hospital wards. Reasons include a suspicion bacteria lurk in the flower water, as well as ... patients or nursing staff knocking over vases during night shifts. An explanation for the uplifting effect of those flowers in my hospital room may be found in numerous studies that have shown, post-surgery, patients in rooms with plants and flowers have shorter recovery times, require fewer analgesics, and experience lower levels of anxiety. Partly, it is a response to beauty. Our compulsion to turn towards the natural world is known as "biophilia". [German–American social psychologist and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm] ... described it as "the passionate love of life and all that is alive", speculating that our separation from nature brings about a level of unrecognised distress. Doctors in some countries are writing green prescriptions, rather than scripts for medication. And not just for mental health problems, but for physical conditions such as high blood pressure.
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Oregon has for years struggled with a drug crisis, reporting one of the highest rates of substance use disorders in the US and ranking last in the nation for access to treatment. The problem is systemic, rooted in decades of failure to invest in the level of behavioral health services needed for people with mental illnesses and addiction. The Pacific north-west state's significant affordable housing shortage has compounded the challenges, as people languish on the streets without care. On 12 November 2024, Cameron Washam, 45, was lying on the street by Portland's Union Station, on the brink of death. He and his wife, Christina Bell, 47, had long struggled with homelessness and addiction. Workers from a Portland street outreach initiative coordinated by the Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon (MHAAO), a non-profit dedicated to peer recovery services, approached and offered help, saying they could immediately take them to a detox program. They entered detox, Washam got emergency surgery for his infection, and after eight days, they were placed in an outpatient program, then a sober recovery home. The outreach effort [is] called the Provider-Police Joint Connection Program. Since its launch, the program has connected 1,005 people to services, including 651 who received access to programs on the same day outreach teams met them and 159 who got into detox and treatment.
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A team of researchers searching for safe, sustainable, and biodegradable alternatives to plastics presented a new type of transparent material at the American Chemical Society (ACS) spring meeting. Unlike previous transparent "wood" designs that sacrifice some biodegradability for strength by including certain types of plastics, the team said its eco-friendly see-through material is made with all natural components. Potential applications for the plastic alternative include electronic device screens, wearable sensors, coatings on solar cells, and transparent wood windows. Bharat Baruah, a professor of chemistry ... said his woodworking hobby led him to research efforts to create transparent wood. He quickly discovered that successfully created transparent wood materials were enhanced with epoxy, a type of plastic, to increase its strength, sacrificing some biodegradability. The professor decided he should see if there were better alternatives. After enlisting Ridham Raval, a Kenneshaw State undergraduate student, to help, the duo used a vacuum chamber, sodium sulfite, sodium hydroxide, and bleach to remove lignin and hemicellulose, two of wood's three components, from a sample of balsa wood. What remained was a paper-like layer of cellulose filled with tiny pores. Instead of refilling the pores with epoxy, the team soaked the cellulose layer in a mixture of egg whites and rice extract. They were "left with semi-transparent slices of wood that were durable and flexible."
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Community currencies – alternative forms of money sometimes also referred to as local or regional currencies – are as diverse as the communities they serve, from grassroots time-banking and mutual credit schemes to blockchain-based Community Inclusion Currencies. Local currencies were common until the 19th century, when the newly emerging nation states transitioned to a centralized system of government-issued money as a way of consolidating their power and stabilizing the economy. Far from being a neutral system of exchange, a currency is a tool to achieve certain goals. Inequality and unsustainability are baked into our monetary system, which is based on debt and interest with practically all the money ... being created by private banks when issuing loans. Well-designed community currencies eliminate two main sources of financial inequality: money's perceived inherent value and the interest rates, which both incentivize people to hoard their money. Like the pipes that bring water to your house, money is the conduit that gives you access to goods and services. The value of money is created in the transaction. In 2015 it was estimated that almost 400 of them are active in Spain alone, and across Africa blockchain-backed systems, like the Sarafu in Kenya, help underserved communities do business without conventional money. Elsewhere, local currencies like the Brixton pound in the U.K. or BerkShares in Massachusetts are a way to keep money in the community, buffering it against the pressures of a globalized economy.
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Believing that a wallet will be returned if dropped in public is one of the most important indicators of well being and happiness. In fact, it's 7 times more impactful that doubling your income, according to the World Happiness Report 2025 just released this week. Jeffrey Sachs conceived of the report that would measure wellness in 2012 and Gallup began interviewing people in 150 countries, and compiling those comparisons every year. While analyzing the results for 2024, the researchers found that belief in the kindness of others is much more closely tied to peoples' happiness than previously thought. For instance, evidence across the world from the perceived–and actual–return of lost wallets shows that people are much too pessimistic about the kindness of their communities compared to the reality. The actual rates of wallet return are around twice as high as people expect. Believing that others are willing to return your lost wallet is shown to be a strong predictor of population happiness–and the Nordic nations once again top the ranking of the world's happiest countries. They also rank among the top places for expected and actual return of lost wallets. "Human happiness is driven by our relationships with others," said Lara Aknin, a professor of social psychology and one of the report's editors. "Investing in positive social connections and engaging in benevolent actions are both matched by greater happiness."
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Americans throw out about 40% of food annually – a waste of both money and natural resources. Reducing food waste can increase food security, promote resource and energy conservation, and address climate change. The Bay Sate has become a leader in reducing food waste. In fact, it's the only state to significantly do so – to the tune of 13.2% – according to a 2024 study. Massachusetts was among the first five states to enact a food waste ban in 2014. (The others were California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont.) "The law has worked really well in Massachusetts," says Robert Sanders, an assistant professor of marketing and analytics at the University of California San Diego and co-author of the study. "That's due to three things: affordability, simplicity, and enforcement.'" If food waste were its own country, it would be the third-highest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. It's also the largest category of waste – at 25% – sent to landfills in the United States. Vanguard Renewables specializes in turning organic waste into renewable energy. The Massachusetts-based company partners with dairy farms to convert food scraps and manure into biogas through anaerobic digestion. Each of Vanguard Renewables' five digesters produces enough energy to heat 1,600 to 3,500 homes per year. Since 2014, Vanguard has processed more than 887,000 tons of food waste in New England, producing enough natural gas to heat 20,000 homes for a year.
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In September 2015, I was unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad's caravan, wondering what the meaning of life was. I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. I decided that I should recreate Durant's experiment and seek my own answers. "I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we're seeking isn't a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive," [replied journalist Oliver Burkeman]. "There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are "why I'm here" – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who've found liberation in something I have written. I would struggle, though, if I were to try to argue that any of these will "mean something" in some kind of timeless way. What's changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That's all – but, then again, I think that is everything. And so I try, on a daily basis, to navigate more and more by that feeling of aliveness – rather than by the feeling of wanting to be in control of things, which is alluring, but deadening in the end."
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In Colombia, compulsory military service has been a burden that generations of young men have had to face for more than 200 years. Since 1991, the Mennonite Christian Association for Justice, Peace and Nonviolent Action – Justapaz - has walked another path. We are a team that has been telling the country for more than three decades that young people were not born for war. That compulsory military service is not a patriotic duty, but an injustice. And, most importantly, that there is another way to serve the â€homeland'. At first, we campaigned for young people to have the right to conscientious objection. In 2016, we decided to go further: to work together with other social, youth and political organisations for the creation of the Social Service for Peace – an alternative service that trades weapons for tools and military discipline for social projects that transform lives. In 2024, our campaign was successful, and the service will be gradually implemented from 2025. Imagine this: instead of an 18-year-old learning to shoot a rifle, you see him teaching reading in a rural school. Instead of long days in barracks, you see him helping to build houses in a conflict-affected community. Instead of preparing his mind for war, you see him learning about human rights, about reconciliation, about how to heal wounds that are not just physical. That's Social Service for Peace. This programme is now codified in law.
Note: War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world. Explore more positive stories like this on healing the war machine.
Thessy Mehrain founded the Women in Blockchain community in 2016. One of Mehrain's most consistent messages is that gender equity in blockchain–and tech in general–isn't a women's issue. "Men become allies once they understand the benefits," she says. "Most companies, especially in the early blockchain days, were run by men." ETHDenver ... hosted a session featuring Njambi Njoroge, Operations Director of Grassroots Economics Foundation in Kenya. The organization has been pioneering community-driven economies by digitizing traditional mutual-aid systems with blockchain. "Njambi talked about how collaboration has always been at the core of Kenyan communities," Mehrain explains. "For centuries, people have come together to build houses, till land, and share resources. Now, with blockchain, they can track these commitments and scale them beyond their immediate community. In the West, our economies are increasingly relying on central authorities–where â€trusted middlemen' own everyone's data and hold the power. But in many places, economies are rooted in collaboration. One of the features of technologies like blockchain is to add a trust infrastructure that allows to remove central entities, and create cooperative economies." "It's not about gender–it's about mindset," she explains. "The masculine principle is about domination–the winner is who gets there first at any price. The feminine principle is about collaboration–winning is defined by getting there first as well but accounts also for the impact on others. You only win together.
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In many parts of the world, building a house or farming a field means taking out loans. But in Kenya, a time-tested system of mutual aid ... has long been the foundation of local economies. Now, Grassroots Economics Foundation is bringing this age-old practice into the digital age. At the helm of this transformation is Njambi Njoroge, Operations Director at Grassroots Economics. Grassroots Economics is built on a concept called "commitment pooling," inspired by indigenous economic systems. Traditionally, in Kenyan villages, neighbours would come together to build houses, farm land, or provide childcare, repaying each other in labor rather than money. These informal debts balanced themselves over time, ensuring that no one was left behind. "We're not inventing anything new," Njoroge says. "We're automating what has always existed." Using blockchain, Grassroots Economics formalizes these commitments into digital vouchers–secure, trackable tokens that represent labor, goods, or services. The blockchain-powered system functions as a local exchange, where people contribute their skills and pull from a shared pool of community resources. The technology ensures that every commitment has a unique digital signature, preventing fraud and allowing real-time tracking of transactions. "On our platform, Sarafu.network, you can see all the transactions happening in a village–how many houses were built, how many farms were tilled, how much labor was exchanged," Njoroge explains. With blockchain, communities can see tangible data showing how much work they've accomplished together.
Note: Grassroots Economics won the 2019 Newsweek Blockchain Impact award for its innovative use of blockchain. Watch our 13 minute video on the promise of blockchain technology. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and technology for good.
A big challenge for democracies today is a decline in trust. The share of Americans who trust government, for example, has fallen from 77% to 22% since 1964. The latest attempt to build trust in the United States is a new online, state-run public forum called Engaged California. The effort aims to prompt, gather, and synthesize conversations about the state's response to the Los Angeles wildfires into reforms. When Taiwan began a similar program in 2014, approval for the government was below 10%. Within eight years, it was 70%, although other factors contributed. The idea of designing civic spaces for civil dialogue has been best expressed in citizen assemblies. Two decades ago, for instance, British Columbia's premier wanted to reform the electoral system but knew few people would trust the government to do it. So he recruited a wide-ranging group of citizens, asking them to devise a solution after listening to a diversity of experts. Citizen assemblies have helped build mutual trust, found Stephen Elstub, professor of democratic politics. "Because [they] require participants to listen to each other's views and debate in an informed and reasonable way," he wrote, "they can improve the quality of democracy." These assemblies have been used worldwide, most notably to help Ireland navigate fraught topics such as abortion. Before they worked in such groups, 72% of participants were dissatisfied with how democracy was working. Afterward, dissatisfaction dropped to 54%.
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Fray Tormenta was a masked wrestler that delighted crowds in Mexico's lucho libre circuit for years, but few would have known that underneath the mask there was a man of god–a drug addict turned priest, who wrestled purely to raise money for an orphanage. The story, though decades old, resurfaced and was retold recently on a Spanish news outlet. Sergio Gutierrez Benitez was born in 1945 the second-youngest of 18 children. By the tender age of 11, Benitez was addicted to drugs and proceeded down a path of crime, robbery, and odd jobs to fund his various dependencies. After that ... he joined the seminary and became a priest in the Piarist Order, studying in Spain and Italy to cement his faith. After joining the Diocese of Texcoco, he wanted to build a shelter for the city's many homeless children and orphans, but the costs were prohibitive. So he pulled on a lucho libre mask and started wrestling for $15 per hour under the name Fray Tormenta. He ended up wrestling for 23 years, from 1977 to 2000, traveling from town to town elbow dropping, tombstoning, and double-legging his way to semi-stardom. Relying on his mask to hide his identity, he eventually revealed his double-personality to officiate the wedding of a close wrestling colleague shortly before opening his orphange ... at the turn of the millennium. Fray Tormenta's Puppies Children's Home, has seen over 2,000 children pass through its walls.
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California has introduced a first-in-the-nation online public platform to help bridge silos. The platform, called Engaged California (EC), enables and encourages the direct engagement of citizens with government and with each other. Engaged California is not glorified polling and is more than a town hall gathering. It is a three-way tool that enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and be responsive; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground. Audrey Tang ... helped craft California's program ... modeled on the pioneering online deliberative platform she created as Taiwan's first digital minister. Tang's vTaiwan platform engages thousands of citizens at a time to weigh in on social issues or policy propositions. In essence, as each participant formulates a position on an issue, others chime in with their own versions. Extreme positions fall to the margins with minimal support, and more consensus views aggregate in the middle. In turn, legislators, parties and administrators can formulate policies in full knowledge of where the public stands. Housed in the state's Office of Data and Innovation, Engaged California is meant to become a permanent feature of governance going forward that will be used for the public to deliberate a range of concerns and proposals
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Tina imagined the sound of Ira's key in the door, and then she realized she would never hear that sound again. It had all been stolen from her. Someone would have to pay the price. "Whoever killed my son," she said, "they were gonna get it." In the days after Ira's death, there were other things besides retribution to keep Tina busy. Tina had wondered for a while about $50 that disappeared from her bank account. Then a woman approached Tina at a vigil for Ira and told her a story. Her boyfriend had been beating her, and Ira found out, and he gave her $50 for a bus ticket so she could get out of town. Turned out he had his own little ministry. And Tina continued that ministry: listening to Ira's friends, having them over for lunch or dinner, occasionally giving someone a place to crash. She thought less and less about revenge. That December, a grand jury indicted two men for the murder of Ira Hopkins. On October 27, 2017, following guilty pleas, [Jy'Aire Smith-Pennick] appeared in court for his sentencing. Almost seven years passed from Jy'Aire's sentencing until the day Tina saw him in person again. "I'm in prison for participating in a murder," he would later say. "And the mother of this man is here, present, on behalf of me, watching me receive my degree." When Jy'Aire gets out, he plans to study sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Tina will work together on the IRA Foundation, teaching at-risk kids that there are better options than drugs and violence.
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Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.