New Light

Urmi Basu is a woman from India who is making a difference. She founded New Light, a non-profit organization in Kolkata, whose mission is to “promote gender equality through education and life-skill training, thereby reduce harm caused by violence and abuse to women and young children.” New Light describes itself on its website as a “community development […]

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For 99% of the Population

“How would you run a whole country without oil?” That’s what Shai Agassi is asking. Agassi is the founder of Better Place, which has developed a model and infrastructure for using electric cars as an alternative to fossil fuel technology (see The Good Times story of August 2011). His answer is to convert an entire country (in […]

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Taking Time Out To Tune In

Here’s a message from Bonnie Fatio, creator of AgeEsteem:   As spring bursts forth does your life seem to be whizzing by too rapidly? Or do you feel like you are dragging yourself out of winter at a slow crawl? If you are like me, at every age there are periods when you experience each of […]

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Shining Hope in Kenya

“Shining Hope for Communities combats gender inequality and extreme poverty in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, by linking tuition-free schools for girls to accessible social services for all.” That’s how this non-profit organization founded in 2009 describes itself. It operates in the slum where one million people live without roads, electricity, or hospitals. Founder Kennedy Odede […]

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Leymah Gbowee, an Inspiration

Leymah Gbowee is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate with two extraordinary tales to tell — her own story and that of the untapped potential of girls in the world.  As a peace activist in Liberia, Leymah Gbowee led a women’s movement that helped end the country’s Second Civil War in 2003. She works to communicate the power […]

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A Practical Guide to Ending Global Poverty

Here’s a practical way to help end global poverty: join the efforts of the Global Poverty Project. No joke! Its vision is: “a world without extreme poverty within a generation. Our mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of people taking action to end extreme poverty. The Global Poverty Project is an educational and […]

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What the Millennium Development Goals Have Accomplished

According to John W. McArthur, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution who from 2002-2006 was Manager and Deputy Director of the UN Millennium Project, “the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] have mobilized government and business leaders to donate tens of billions of dollars to life-saving tools, such as antiretroviral drugs and modern mosquito nets. […]

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Sport as a Tool for Positive Social Change

Everyone knows the power that football, also known as soccer, has on the world. Played in over 200 countries and watched by millions upon millions of fans, it’s considered the world’s most popular sport, according to Encyclopædia Britannica and leading experts on the subject. Harnessing this power, streetfootballworld is a global network of almost 100 organizations that use […]

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The Frog that Lifts Communities Out of Poverty

How can you help fight for sustainable agriculture, forestry and tourism, and contribute to mitigating climate change, protecting wildlife habitats and combating child labor on farms? By looking for the green frog seal on the products you buy. It’s Rainforest Alliance’s green frog. That green frog symbol allows consumers to identify a legitimately sustainable product or service and […]

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Celebrating Women

For International Women’s Day, The Good Times would like to share the following story about the positive effects women have on other women. It’s told by someone who takes an evening class at Stanford: “The last lecture was on the mind-body connection – the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) […]

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