Imagine if – when you were young – your chore list including playing soccer for four hours a day instead of washing dishes and taking care of your little brother. For most kids – especially in Third World countries – this would be a dream come true and thanks to four creative Harvard engineers, this [...]
Social reality game designer, Jane McGonigal, has been proving to the world for awhile now that video games don’t have to be a waste of time and on March 3rd, with the debut of her latest work, EVOKE, she’s going to do it again. EVOKE is like SIMS on steriods. You think it’s difficult raising [...]
One of the most exhilarating aspects of traveling the world is learning the life stories of new people, but the Doctors Without Borders web debut of their “Conditional Critical” videos from the Democratic Republic of Congo this week reminded me that this exhilaration is not universal, nor is it even the majority. The vast majority [...]
Hundreds of thousands of concerned global citizens will join the call to fight AIDS on December 1, World AIDS Day, as Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education) hosts an interactive discussion following the premiere of an award-winning documentary that unveils the effects of AIDS on African women and girls. Where the Water Meets the Sky, [...]
Family vacation. I have to chuckle when I read those words. I have this image of tons of a luggage, racing to get to the car on time, somebody crying, and a the oldest child bargaining with his parents as to why he should be allowed to stay home alone. It’s the concept that sitcoms [...]
Timbuk2 Solar Bags at Daraja Academy from Mark Lukach on Vimeo. Imagine a world where instead of functioning as a black hole that eats your keys, your wallet, and everything you own – your handbag not only carried what you needed, it actually created something new for you. What if your handbag was suddenly so [...]
An African man was the last person I expected to find in Northern Ireland. I was a few miles short of County Donegal, the most remote and commonly Gaelic-speaking region of the island and there he was: a Kenyan standing in the front of our classroom, introducing himself as our professor. In fact, he turned [...]
Introducing NextAid Imagine taking the power of music, the conviction of environmentally sustainable process, and the commitment to the children of Africa and combining them all to reach those infected with and orphaned by the HIV/AIDS virus. If you throw in strong local non-profit organization partnerships and a small team of passionate people, you’ve got [...]
“We believe in the inner strength and beauty of every human being,” Ingrid Munro, founder of Jamii Bora, speaks softly into the microphone. “It is often the most destitute that an do the biggest miracles.” Case in point: an organization that began in 1999 with 50 Nairobi beggars intended to lift themselves and others out [...]
Traveling through rural India in 2003, Anna Sidana saw a simple need that was out of reach for the people there, the need for safe, bright light. She went home and raised enough money for 250 portable “MightyLights” to donate to the children of Rajasthan, India. After seeing the amazing response, she convinced her employer, eBay Inc., [...]
Among many other privileges we take for granted in the ‘West,’ the simple gift of electricity is one we rarely think about. While nearly every U.S. citizen is connected to the grid, many in the world have never even seen a light switch – access to electricity isn’t just a boost to standard of living, [...]
The video above is one of the most eloquent and comprehensive explanations of the HIV/AIDS epidemic I ‘ve seen. In it, Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder.org, discusses the progression of HIV/AIDS in the world with the Gapminder World data platform. The images are truly stunning. The lecture is even more stimulating as it reveals the [...]
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Last week, the Group of Eight seems to have adopted this proverb as its modus operandi for fighting the world’s hunger epidemic. Announced at the end of this year’s G8 summit [...]
