Elder Wisdom Circle
Have you just about given up on finding the man or woman of your dreams? Have you recently been laid off? Are you 18 years old, uninterested in going to college, and paralyzed by your choices for the future? Or are you just stumped by those black spots on your tangerine trees? Answers to these, and other questions, are just an e-mail away at elderwisdomcircle.org, a pod of 55 senior citizens with ... posted on Feb 23 2006, 1,755 reads

Retail Renunciation
About 50 Bay Area residents have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear. Calling themselves the Compact, the group meets monthly to reaffirm their commitment to the rule, which is to never buy anything new. Compacters can get as much as they want from thrift shops, Craigslist, freecycle.org, eBay and flea markets, as long as the items are s... posted on Feb 22 2006, 1,395 reads

Campaign for Female Education
During a trip to Zimbabwe in 1990, Ann Cotton realized that Africa would never conquer poverty and disease unless its women were educated. She found that families that could not afford to educate all their children would give priority to boys. She knew that educated women were more likely to not contract HIV/AIDS, to marry later, and to have fewer children who were healthier and more likely to go ... posted on Feb 20 2006, 1,195 reads

Barefoot College
Inspired by Gandhi and moved to respond to India’s 1967 famine, Bunker Roy moved from the affluent suburb where he grew up to Rajasthan, India, to help rural villagers improve their lives. The organization he founded in 1972, Social Work and Research Centre, came to be known as “Barefoot College” because its clients are poor, rural, often semiliterate villagers. Communities from all over Ind... posted on Feb 18 2006, 2,731 reads

Olympic Green
Organizers of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, promise that their games will be "the greenest ever." They have vowed to put together a "carbon neutral" event—meaning it will have no net impact on climate change—by investing in forestry, energy efficiency, and other measures to offset carbon dioxide emissions from the event. ... posted on Feb 15 2006, 1,128 reads

No Regrets
Dr. Raed Arini, a Palestinian surgeon in the middle east spends his days and nights calming the living and binding the dead. He is among the good news in the violence that encapsulates the region. When asked about his motivation he simply states, I have to do this," he says, "they are my brothers."
... posted on Feb 14 2006, 2,679 reads

Clean
A self-cleaning bathroom is on the way. Nanotechnology may yet rescue us from the drudgery of the weekly ritual of blitzing the bathroom. Scientists in Australia have developed an environmentally friendly coating containing special nanoparticles that could do the job of cleaning and disinfecting for us. ... posted on Feb 13 2006, 1,232 reads

The Global Plan
Tuberculosis is a tragedy, it kills someone every 15 seconds, it has been declared an emergency in 46 African countries, and it is preventable. The Global Plan is an initiative that seeks to completely halt the spread of TB and treat 50 million people by 2015. Four hundred organizations worldwide have backed the plan, including Bill Gates who donated $600 million. ... posted on Feb 07 2006, 1,306 reads

Volunteer Boom
Baby boomers, Americans who were born from 1946 to 1964, have the potential to be one of the most powerful volunteer forces the world has ever seen. This 70 million person cohort, that begins turning 60 this year, are better educated and are expected to live longer than any other generation before them. The Harvard School for Public Health is one of many institutions that are launching campaigns ... posted on Jan 26 2006, 1,075 reads

The Long Bet
Wanna bet that by 2050 we will receive intelligent signals from outside our solar system? How about that by the year 2020, tickets for space travel - at least to Moon, will be available over the counter? Designed to foster long-term thinking, and as a forum for focussed discussion, Long Bets is a website that you can make long-term socially significant predictions and place wagers on them. The w... posted on Jan 21 2006, 1,263 reads