Quote of the Day: “Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.” – Albert Schweitzer
Photo: by brian donovan, CC license
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This story was submitted as a nomination to the Reader’s Digest “Top 50 Nicest Places in America” contest: a crowd-sourced effort to uncover nooks where people are still kind and respectful in an era of cultural and political divides. Be sure and vote for which story you think should be nominated as the Nicest Place by visiting the Reader’s Digest website.
After an ugly incident split this town, the citizens found common ground when they anointed a homeless poet their “adopted grandfather.”
Ask people what they like about Kingman and they’ll bring up the man known as Santa James. Santa James, AKA James Zyla, is a former real-estate salesman turned wandering poet who has become the town’s “adopted grandfather,” according to the local police chief. He’s also homeless.
When residents discovered his thoughtful nature and musical gifts, they teamed up to make sure he always has a place to stay, gigs to play, and a helping hand when he needs it. In return, he shares hugs, songs, and his one-of-a-kind free spirit.
WATCH: After 12 Years of Waving to Students From Her Window, Watch Her Reaction to 400 Kids Saying Goodbye
“There exists in Kingman a spirit of generosity,” Santa James told the Los Angeles Times last year. “It’s not just the young or the old. It permeates the generations.”
The town of about 25,000 people sits on the legendary Route 66, about 100 miles south of Las Vegas. Once home to a major military base and mining economy, later bypassed by the interstate and half-forgotten, Kingman got a black eye a few years ago when comic Sacha Baron Cohen’s television cameras captured a rowdy crowd of locals shouting down a proposed mosque. Kingman residents decried the intolerance—the city has had a mosque for thirty years, along with a well-established immigrant population—and locals stepped up their efforts to showcase the city’s best qualities.
“The community was very upset,” says our nominator, Coleen Haines, who has been at the heart of that effort as a city PR specialist. “Kingman is a welcoming place.”
Santa James has become the symbol of the town’s best spirit, Haines says. His story shows that Kingman is the kind of place that finds room for anybody who helps make it better, even if it’s just with a smile and a song.
“The mayor gave him a key to the city,” she says. “It showed how we really go out of the way to help people.”
Reprinted with permission from Reader’s Digest. To learn more about GNN’s part in searching for the Top 10 Nicest Places, click here.
(WATCH the poet in action as he plays the piano in the video below)
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It has been 50 years since this iconic Ohio river caught fire – but now, it has become a poster child for environmental transformation.
Running through the city of Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River had already caught fire several times prior to the infamous blaze on June 22nd, 1969. The flames were a byproduct of the sheer amount of oil, chemicals, sewage, and pollution from the city’s heavily industrialized infrastructure.
“It smelled like a septic tank,” one Cleveland native told Nat Geo. “It literally bubbled and produced methane in July and August. It wasn’t bad—it was terrible. You can’t describe it using printable language.”
LOOK: Determined to Save His Country’s Water Supply, 26-Year-old Has Revived 10 Lakes From a Polluted Mess
Though it was not the first fire on the river, it was to be the last. Cleveland lawmakers became tired of companies and manufacturers treating the river like their own personal dumping grounds and they went before Congress to demand a change.
After city legislators rallied for federal intervention, the fire on the Cuyahoga River sparked the passage of the Clean Water Act and helped to inspire the creation of the EPA.
Over the course of the last 50 years, the act has helped to protect and preserve hundreds of waterways across the US – including the Cuyahoga River.
The river now boasts over 70 species of fish, all of which are edible. In addition to the shoreline now supporting dozens of birds and local wildlife, the waters are now open for swimming, paddle-boarding, and other recreational activities.
“People can see fish leaping out of the water here in the industrial shipping channel,” Jane Goodman, executive director of Cuyahoga River Restoration, told Nat Geo. “We had become the poster river for everything that could go wrong with a river. Now we’re a poster river for everything that can go right. It’s the Lazarus river—it came back from death.”
(WATCH the news coverage below or our international viewers can watch the footage on the CBS News website)
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A Chick-Fil-A employee is being hailed as a hero after he rushed to help a choking child who had somehow managed to get tangled in his seatbelt.
Logan Simmons had been working a shift at the restaurant in Hall County, Georgia when a distressed mother started calling for help from the drive thru lane.
While the woman was in the driver’s seat of her car, her 6-year-old son had gotten the seatbelt wrapped around his neck – and his face was quickly losing color.
When Logan heard the calls for help from the drive thru window, he leapt out of the window and rushed over to the woman’s car. He then climbed into the vehicle and used his pocketknife to cut the boy free from the seatbelt.
LOOK: Barefoot Teacher Pictured Running Ahead of Tornado to Warn Families in Carpool Lane to Take Cover
Needless to say, the frantic mother was overwhelmed with gratitude for the teen’s intervention.
Simmons’s mother also expressed pride in her heroic son when she told WSB-TV: “I’m amazed he didn’t panic. As his mother, I would have panicked. I’d be running around going, ‘Oh my gosh! What do we do?’”
Logan, on the other hand, says that he is just happy that he was in the right place at the right time.
(WATCH the news coverage below)
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For the first time in 17 years, there will be no whaling in Icelandic waters this summer.
Due to a shrinking international market for whale meat and the expansion of a no-fishing coastal zone, both of the nation’s major whaling companies have decided to abandon their summer hunting season altogether, meaning that no whales of any kind will be hunted in Iceland.
IP-Utgerd – a company specializing in harpooning minke whales – said that the expansion of the no-fishing zone would force their ships to travel farther out to sea, making the venture far more costly than usual. The company now says that they will be focusing on collecting sea cucumbers for the summer, according to Icelandic news platform RUV.
RELATED: Watch the Badass Footage of Africa’s First All-Female Anti-Poaching Team in Action
Hvalur, the other Icelandic whaling company, specializes in harpooning fin whales – an endangered species that is hailed for being the second largest whale in the world.
Though the company typically exports 100% of their catch to Japan, a shrinking demand for whale meat has prompted them to abandon their summer harpooning.
Whalers have been hunting in Icelandic waters since the country lifted their restrictions on whaling in 2003. Though the companies may reconsider their whaling ventures next summer, environmentalists and marine biologists are rejoicing over this year’s harpooning respite.
Be Sure And Share This Whale Of A Tale With Your Friends On Social Media – File photo by Mike Pennington, CC
Whether it was divine intervention or just a serendipitous signal from the sky, an anxious Chinese college student was given the perfect sign of encouragement earlier this month.
The student had been studying for her exams in Shaoguan, Guangdong when she saw a cloud that was shaped like a thumbs up.
“I had been feeling very low, and after I saw the cloud I became much happier,” the student told Chinese video platform Pear. “I was so excited.”
Since the unidentified student shared the photo to social media, it has been shared thousands of times.
LOOK: Passengers Surprised With Train Full of Flowers – and Their Reactions Are Bloomin’ Beautiful
The cloud’s similarity to a social media “Like” button prompted one user to say: “You photographed the ‘Like’ cloud, so it means you will do well on your exam!”
Another enthusiastic commenter said: “Even the universe is encouraging you!”
A third Weibo user, who is also a university candidate, said: “I feel confident about my exam too after seeing the pictures.”
Perhaps the cloud’s formation was just a sweet coincidence, but it has apparently done a fine job of encouraging internet users to do their best.
Encourage Your Friends By Sharing The ‘Like’ Cloud To Social Media…
Quote of the Day: “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words—and never stops at all.” – Emily Dickinson
Photo: by featherlite, CC license
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Rather than requiring families to pay for kids’ education, this clever little school is asking students to collect plastic waste from around their communities. Hear our Good News Guru tell the inspiring story on the radio in Los Angeles—during the June 7, 2019 Ellen K. Morning Show on KOST-103.5.
SEE the full story on GNN with photos…
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This story was submitted as a nomination to the Reader’s Digest “Top 50 Nicest Places in America” contest: a crowd-sourced effort to uncover nooks where people are still kind and respectful in an era of cultural and political divides. Be sure and vote for which story you think should be nominated as the Nicest Place by visiting the Reader’s Digest website.
Crimes of compassion are nothing new in this melting pot, where everyone gets along, no matter what part of the world they came from.
Three years ago, when Lydia Clark-Sumpter moved to Harding Park, a blue-collar neighborhood of 236 tidy homes on the East River in New York City’s Bronx borough, there was a big smiley-face balloon tied to her front gate, and no clue as to who left it.
She didn’t know it at the time, but Clark-Sumpter, a pediatric nurse practitioner at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s hospital, was the victim of a crime of compassion. She would soon find out that there were kindness vigilantes on the loose in her new neighborhood, a diverse enclave, where 22 flags representing the nationalities of the people who live there fly outside the homeowners association.
WATCH: After 12 Years of Waving to Students From Her Window, Watch Her Reaction to 400 Kids Saying Goodbye
That winter, after a bad storm, Clark-Sumpter opened her door, ready to dig herself out, only to find that someone had already saved her the trouble.
“Not only did they shovel, but they came in the gate and all the way up to the front door,” she says. Later that year, she returned from work to find a bag of fresh-picked tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants on her patio.
Clark-Sumpter wasn’t the only victim. Retired NYPD detective Elbin Mena, who has lived in Harding Park for 35 years, also found his walk mysteriously shoveled that winter. He knew to expect such things and was prepared. He has motion-sensor cameras, and when he reviewed the video footage, he was able to identify—and thank—his neighbor.
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On that same block, garbage cans are mysteriously hauled back up driveways on garbage day. José Gonzalez, president of the Harding Park Homeowners Association, knows who is responsible: It’s Mena who is sparing his neighbors that little pain. (Until now, Gonzalez had kept Mena’s secret.)
As for the welcoming neighbor who tied a balloon to Clark-Sumpter’s front gate? The perpetrator is still on the loose. When you live in Harding Park, you have to get used to that kind of thing. That’s just life in a high-crimes-of-compassion neighborhood.
Reprinted with permission from Reader’s Digest. To read the full Cedar House nomination, you can visit the Reader’s Digest website. To learn more about GNN’s part in searching for the Top 10 Nicest Places, click here.
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Imagine if your printer had an “unprint” button that used pulses of light to remove toner, curbing environmental impacts compared with conventional paper recycling.
A Rutgers-led team has created a new way to unprint paper that, unlike laser-based methods, can work with the standard, coated paper used in home and office printers. The new method uses pulses of light from a xenon lamp, and can erase black, blue, red and green toners without damaging the paper, according to a study in the Journal of Cleaner Production.
“Our method makes it possible to unprint and then reprint on the same paper at least five times, which is typically as many times paper can be reused with conventional recycling,” said study co-author Rajiv Malhotra, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
“By eliminating the steps involved in conventional recycling, our unprinting method could reduce energy costs, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.”
Conventional recycling of coated paper is a major contributor to climate change emissions, chemical pollution and energy use, according to the study. Extending the life of paper while avoiding these recycling steps would yield significant environmental benefits.
The engineers’ next steps are to further refine the method by testing additional toner colors on a wider range of paper types. Unprinting can be done with simple equipment and a wipe with a very small amount of benign alcohol, and the engineers are working to integrate unprinting with typical office and home printers.
Reprinted from Rutgers University
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This story has been reprinted from its original publishing date in July 2015 for #ThrowbackThursday.
Usually when you hear stories about older people crashing cars into buildings, it’s by accident.
But when 91-year-old Walter Thomas of Woodstock, Illinois rammed a car through a garage door, it was a very deliberate dream come true.
When Thomas told his granddaughter Becky that his one and only fantasy was to drive through a garage door, she got to work figuring out how to make it happen.
WATCH: How a 97-Year-old Artist Used Doodles to Save His Beloved Hometown From Being Torn Down
Eventually, she and her family were able to track down both a demolition car and a garage door that was already worn down and going to be replaced anyway.
When Thomas came crashing through the garage in reverse, Becky said “it was like he was a little boy again.”
Thomas also said that the garage stunt was so much fun, he might consider sky diving next.
(WATCH the stunt below or our international readers can watch the video on the CBS News website)
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It’s already challenging enough for environmentalists to keep beaches clear of washed up trash and plastic debris – but the most difficult problem lies in cleaning up all of the millions of tiny microplastics that are impossible to pick up and separate from the sand.
Fortunately, a group of engineering students succeeded in developing a massive new vacuum cleaner that can collect microplastics without removing any of the sand from the beach.
The 12 Canadian students from the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec built their Hoola One plastic vacuum cleaner as a class project.
“We did some research and we realized there was no machine around the world to do this kind of job,” Hoola One co-founder Sam Duval told Hawaii Public Radio. “So we told each other, ʻWe will invent it,’ and we did it.”
MORE: Construction Begins On First Ever Commercial Plastics-to-Fuel Factory in the US
Using a handheld hose, the machine sucks up plastic and sand and dumps it all into a massive tank of water. Since rocks and sand are heavier than plastic, they sink to the bottom of the tank so they can be dumped back onto the beach. The plastic, on the other hand, floats to the top of the tank.
As a means of testing their machine’s efficiency, they recently used it on the sands of Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach – which is also notorious for being one of the dirtiest beaches in the world.
Though their first prototype experienced a number of technical issues, the students managed to fix the problems and tidy up the beach.
According to Hawaii Public Radio, the team left the Hoola One vacuum on the island as a donation to the state department. They are now researching the ecological impacts of the vacuum on the beach while they search for funding and sponsorships to produce more Hoola One vacuums.
Assuming they are successful, then the machines could start cleaning up beaches around the world.
(WATCH the video below) – Photo by Hawaii DNLR
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A 17-year-old teenager is being hailed as a hero after he caught a toddler who fell out of a second-story window.
Feuzi Zabaat had been working on the streets of Istanbul, Turkey when he saw the little girl approach the window earlier this week.
The toddler, 2-year-old Doha Muhammed, had wandered away from her mother as she was cooking dinner.
LOOK: Barefoot Teacher Pictured Running Ahead of Tornado to Warn Families in Carpool Lane to Take Cover
Feuzi was concerned when he saw the child approach the open window. Shortly after he crossed the street, Doha tumbled out of the window – but luckily, she fell straight into the arms of the teenager.
Grateful for the teen’s rescue, Doha’s family gave Feuzi 200 Turkish Lira ($35) as a reward – but he insists that he was simply happy to do the right thing.
(WATCH the video below)
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Quote of the Day: “Think well of yourself and proclaim this fact to the world, not in words but in great deeds.” – C. Larson
Photo: Women in Nepal – by World Bank Collection, CC license
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
When an unidentified woman was frustrated to see a man sleeping in a McDonald’s booth, she took a photo of him and published it to a private Facebook group to express her criticism.
After the man was given a chance to explain himself to the community, however, dozens of people rallied to help him get back on his feet.
21-year-old Simon Child has been homeless and struggling to support his son since the recent death of his mother. When the woman photographed him napping in the McDonald’s booth, he had been catching up on his sleep in between his shifts at the restaurant in Fayetteville, Georgia.
MORE: Homeless Man Gets Housing and Work Thanks to Teen Girl Who Saw His Plea for a Job at a Bus Stop
Upon hearing about the photo, Child said that his feelings were hurt – but thankfully, he doesn’t feel that way anymore.
Earlier this week, local news reporters interviewed Child and gave him a chance to tell his story to the world. When the young man went into work the following day, he was shocked to find that dozens of people had brought him heaps of diapers, clothing, toiletries, and supplies.
The owners of a community eatery reached out to Child so they could lend him a car for job interviews. A barber gave him a free haircut so he could look spiffy for his new employment opportunities. Other members of the community paid for Child and his son to stay in a hotel until they find permanent housing.
Since our story aired last night, Simon received a free haircut from a local barber. He has a new job opportunity too, he told me. pic.twitter.com/IMeiu8ex50
— Matt Johnson (@MattWSB) June 25, 2019
Another community member started a GoFundMe campaign in order to raise money for Child – and the fundraiser has already raised over $2,000 in 24 hours.
Furthermore, Child had a chance to speak to the woman who took his photo. She told him that she had never meant to shame anyone and she had only been expressing her frustration with the town.
CHECK OUT: Simple Mistake in the Kitchen Turns into Sweet Success for a Homeless Veteran
That being said, Child insisted that he did not harbor any ill will towards her.
“I’m not homeless, not now, thanks to her,” he told WSB-TV. “I didn’t think the community would even care enough to do that, but they care.”
(WATCH the news coverage below) – Photo by WSB-TV
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Food lovers around the world were shocked and heartbroken when beloved culinary icon Anthony Bourdain committed suicide in 2018 – but although his death was a tragedy, it did help to spark a new movement to care for the mental health of restaurant workers.
As Bourdain fans celebrate what would have been his 63rd birthday on June 25th, restaurants across Sacramento are preparing to launch a pilot program of the “I Got Your Back” project over the course of the next two months.
Patrick Mulvaney, who is the head chef of a Sacramento restaurant, says that he was inspired to launch the project after Bourdain’s death occurred shortly after several of his friends and colleagues in the culinary field passed away.
This is not an unusual occurrence in the food industry – hospitality and restaurant workers experience higher rates of substance abuse, alcoholism, and depression than almost any other career field.
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He and several other chefs working within the city then met with mental health experts in order to outline various workplace strategies that they could implement in their restaurants in order to care for the mental health of their staffers.
One of the strategies used in the program is having a designated staffer on hand who is trained to pay attention to the moods and behavior of the other workers.
“What we’re working on is that every restaurant will have someone with a purple hand on their lapel who knows about mental health,” Mulvaney told ABC10. “So they’ll be able to say to you, ‘Are you okay? Are you having a problem?’ But you also will know that they’ll be a safe person, so you can say, ‘Hey, I’m anxious or depressed.’”
CHECK OUT: Managing Your Gut Bacteria Shown to Alleviate Anxiety, Says New Research
Mulvaney and his team also designed a system in which employees drop a mood card into an anonymous box when they clock in for a shift. This gives employees a safe place to express their state of mind and the floor manager a new method for knowing how the crew is doing and feeling. Taking a temperature of employees’ moods this way alerts the manager to red flags they might not otherwise have known and it presents the chance to check-in and offer support.
Since Mulvaney and his wife launched the program in their restaurant back in October 2018, they have seen a noticeable improvement in their team’s mood and interactions.
MORE: Massive Study Shows That Two Hours a Week is Key Dose of Nature for Health Benefits
“We came together as a family to talk about it before we opened,” Mulvaney told The Sacramento Bee. “I saw all of our staff using the tools we provided for them to talk about it. Our team was coming together to have that conversation and support each other.”
With 22 more restaurants piloting the program over the summer, Mulvaney hopes to see it picked up by more kitchens and workplaces across the nation.
(WATCH the video below)
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In this exciting new study, researchers say they have identified a kind of bacteria in the human infant gut that can prevent food allergies – and their discovery has led to a new treatment that could reverse the condition altogether.
Every three minutes, a food-related allergic reaction sends someone to the emergency room in the U.S. Currently, the only way to prevent a reaction is for people with food allergies to completely avoid the food to which they are allergic.
Researchers are actively seeking new treatments to prevent or reverse food allergies in patients; and these new insights into the microbiome – the complex ecosystem of microorganisms that live in the gut and other body sites – have suggested that an altered gut microbiome may play a pivotal role in the development of food allergies.
The study, which was led by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, identifies the species of bacteria in the human infant gut that protects against food allergies, finding changes associated with the development of food allergies and an altered immune response.
In preclinical studies in a mouse model of food allergy, the team found that giving an enriched oral formulation of five or six species of bacteria found in the human gut protected against food allergies and reversed the established disease by reinforcing tolerance of food allergens. The team’s results are published in Nature Medicine.
“This represents a sea change in our approach to therapeutics for food allergies,” said co-senior author Lynn Bry, director of the Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center at the Brigham. “We’ve identified the microbes that are associated with protection and ones that are associated with food allergies in patients. If we administer defined consortia representing the protective microbes as a therapeutic, not only can we prevent food allergies from happening, but we can reverse existing food allergies in preclinical models. With these microbes, we are resetting the immune system.”
The research team conducted studies in both humans and preclinical models to understand the key bacterial species involved in food allergies. The team repeatedly collected fecal samples every four to six months from 56 infants who developed food allergies, finding many differences when comparing their microbiota to 98 infants who did not develop food allergies. Fecal microbiota samples from infants with or without food allergies were transplanted into mice who were sensitized to eggs. Mice who received microbiota from healthy controls were more protected against egg allergy than those who received microbiota from the infants with food allergies.
Using computational approaches, researchers analyzed differences in the microbes of children with food allergies compared to those without in order to identify microbes associated with protection or food allergies in patients. The team tested to see if orally administering protective microbes to mice could prevent the development of food allergies. They developed two consortia of bacteria that were protective. Two separate consortia of five or six species of bacteria derived from the human gut that belong to species within the Clostridiales or the Bacteroidetes could suppress food allergies in the mouse model, fully protecting the mice and keeping them resistant to egg allergy. Giving other species of bacteria did not provide protection.
“It’s very complicated to look at all of the microbes in the gut and make sense of what they may be doing in food allergy, but by using computational approaches, we were able to narrow in on a specific group of microbes that are associated with a protective effect,” said co-first author Georg Gerber, co-director of the Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center.
“Being able to drill down from hundreds of microbial species to just five or six or so has implications for therapeutics and, from a basic science perspective, means that we can start to figure out how these specific bacteria are conferring protection,” he added.
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To understand how the bacteria species might be influencing food allergy susceptibility, the team also looked at immunological changes, both in the human infants and in mice. They found that the Clostridiales and Bacteroidetes consortia targeted two important immunological pathways and stimulated specific regulatory T cells, a class of cells that modulate the immune system, changing their profile to promote tolerant responses instead of allergic responses. These effects were found both in the pre-clinical models and also found to occur in human infants.
The new approach represents a marked contrast to oral immunotherapy, a strategy that aims to increase the threshold for triggering an allergic reaction by giving an individual small but increasing amounts of a food allergen. Unlike this approach, the bacteriotherapy changes the immune system’s wiring in an allergen-independent fashion, with potential to broadly treat food allergies rather than desensitizing an individual to a specific allergen.
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“When you can get down to a mechanistic understanding of what microbes, microbial products, and targets on the patient side are involved, not only are you doing great science, but it also opens up the opportunity for finding a better therapeutic and a better diagnostic approach to disease. With food allergies, this has given us a credible therapeutic that we can now take forward for patient care,” said Bry.
Bry and Gerber, along with several other authors of the paper, are founders and have equity in ConsortiaTX, a company that is developing a live human biotherapeutic product. ConsortiaTX is now preparing for a Phase 1b trial in pediatric food allergy, followed by expansion into additional allergic diseases.
Reprinted from Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Be Sure And Share The Good News With Your Friends On Social Media – File photo by Nick Youngson, CC / Alpha Stock Images
As a means of combatting plastic pollution, Canada is moving to ban dozens of single-use plastics as soon as 2021.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in a speech that he and his government are planning on phasing out several forms of common plastic waste, such as water bottles, single-use bags, coffee cup lids, and straws.
Canadian legislators are reportedly drawing inspiration from the European Union’s recent ban on plastics, which was approved in a landslide vote back in October.
MORE: Construction Begins On First Ever Commercial Plastics-to-Fuel Factory in the US
The directive, which was passed 571 votes to 53, prohibits the use of many of the most commonly found forms of plastic pollution, such as cotton swabs, plastic plates and cutlery, straws, and drink stirrers.
The items were selected for the ban because they can easily be replaced by biodegradable or environmentally-friendly materials. Materials that cannot be so easily replaced by the manufacturers, such as cigarette filters and plastic bottles, have still been given aggressive deadlines for curbing their plastic usage
According to a press release from Trudeau’s office, less than 10% of plastic used in Canada gets recycled. Without a change in course, Canadians will throw away an estimated $11 billion worth of plastic materials each year by 2030.
Canadians are tired of seeing our beaches, parks, streets, and shorelines littered with plastic waste. Learn more about the action we’re taking to ban harmful single-use plastics: https://t.co/GZBt0K10Nt #BeatPlasticPollution pic.twitter.com/eZ0yT8ckY5
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) June 10, 2019
“Canadians know first-hand the impacts of plastic pollution, and are tired of seeing their beaches, parks, streets, and shorelines littered with plastic waste,” says Trudeau. “We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment, and create jobs and grow our economy. We owe it to our kids to keep the environment clean and safe for generations to come.”
Though the ban is still in its early stages of planning, Trudeau said that he and his fellow lawmakers would work with packaging manufacturers and companies in order to ensure a smooth transition towards more sustainable practices.
(WATCH Trudeau’s speech below)
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This 13-year-old baker doesn’t just serve up delicious treats to paying customers – he also serves them up to the homeless and hungry people of Washington DC.
Since Michael Platt has always loved to bake, he decided to use his passion as a means of helping the less fortunate; so when he was 11 years old, he launched a baking business called Michaels Desserts.
The bakery runs on a one-for-one business model similarly to Toms Shoes: for every pastry that a customer buys, Michael gives one away to an underprivileged person.
Once or twice every month, Michael travels from his home in Bowie, Maryland to DC so he can hand out dozens of baked treats to kids, adults, and families in domestic violence and homeless shelters.
WATCH: 7-Year-Old Becomes Certified Barber So She Can Offer Free Haircuts To Kids in Her City
The teen philanthropist also works with the Washington DC-based nonprofit No Kid Hungry in order to distribute his pastries.
“I always wanted to have a purpose for what I do,” Michael told The Washington Post. “It’s all about helping people — not just having a purpose for yourself, but thinking about, ‘How does this touch other things?’”
Michael says he mostly fills pastry orders for people in the DC area, but he has made out-of-state shipments as well. If you want to check out some of Michaels creations or place an order, you can visit his website, Instagram, or Facebook page.
(WATCH the WJLA news coverage below)
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Quote of the Day: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” – Jimmy Dean
Photo: by Flavio Vetus Chettefrega, CC license, cropped
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
