If only charitable giving was as easy as buying a Coke at a vending machine. Well, now it is—at least in Japan. A Coca-Cola bottling company in Japan and the country's Red Cross have joined together to enable people to make donations by putting money into a vending machine.
An anonymous donor in Denmark has left nearly $200,000 in a clothes recycling bin outside a charity shop run by the Red Cross. The money was found in a bin liner under piles of donated clothing.
Young American volunteers marked Independence Day by continuing their remarkable clean up on behalf of Japan's tsunami survivors. And, their American-style celebration helped to lift the spirits of the struggling community there.
The sixth annual Happiness and Its Causes conference in Brisbane, Australia featured four days of lectures and workshops featuring some of the world's best known happiness gurus, including the Dalai Lama. The successful conference, attended by 2000 people paying big bucks, is just the latest evidence of the recent boom in all things happiness.
Five years ago, an Evergreen High School custodian was in the middle of bankruptcy when he won the Washington State Lottery's Quinto game -- 3.4 million dollars. But he still lives in a tiny house in Seattle and drives to work in the same car. He splurged on a new track at school.
A freak accident during her bachelorette party left Rachel Chapman in a wheelchair. Despite the upheaval, there was never any doubt the two would get married.Last week Rachel finally got to wear her wedding dress, at an marriage ceremony and reception donated by the folks at 1-800-Registry, who heard their story on the Today show.
In Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, six low-income families are moving into houses they helped build themselves, thanks to a remarkable program set up by the Interfaith Housing Alliance. Working collectively as a group, participants build their own homes and the homes of their future neighbors, and only move-in when all of the homes are completed.
Taisia Sidorova, 21, from St Petersburg, was given the last rites after an accident that left half her skull smashed and the damaged left hemisphere of her brain removed. But slowly - with the love and support of her family - she came around, and the artistic right side of her brain began compensating for lack on the left. Even though she'd never been interested in drawing before, she began to display remarkable natural talent.
The descendants of Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the Supreme Court's landmark blunders, which upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation have united to create a civil rights education organization bearing their famous names.
A travel insurance company is looking for the good deeds that turned around some travel nightmares for its new contest, "World's Unluckiest Traveler: The Rescue". Travelers are already posting at the website, stories featuring the kindness of strangers, how a stranger salvaged a mishap or saved an entire vacation. The prize is a $10,000 vacation.
Just two years after losing all four limbs in an explosion in Iraq, Army Specialist Brendan Marrocco was given the keys to a brand new home designed especially with his injuries in mind. The group Building Homes for Heroes built the high-tech home, which is equipped with an elevator, sensors that operate the lighting and front door, and electronic controls that raise and lower the sink, stove, and kitchen shelves.
A 15-year-old girl from North England has been fighting cancer for four years and now strangers around the world are fighting to help her cross off as many items as possible from her 'bucket list'. To stay in a caravan. To swim with sharks. To go to Kenya. To go to Cadbury World eating lots of chocolate.
The city of Grand Rapids came together to produce a sweeping and inspiring music video as an official response to the Newsweek article calling the Michigan metropolis a dying city. The filming on May 22nd involved 5,000 participants and a major shutdown of downtown Grand Rapids.
National Football League players are rallying around a ten year-old boy whose mother in desperation drove him and his siblings into the river. Now that his family is gone, the boy's new extended family includes many players who are providing fun activities and financial support.
Both daughters are alive today because the parents had faith that a new baby would turn out to be an unlikely organ match and able to donate bone marrow to her older sister, saving her from leukemia.
Two months after a tornado destroyed much of the town of Phil Campbell, Alabama, people from around the world named Phil Campbell have descended on the town to make sure the clean-up continues. Men from as far away as Alaska, Australia and Scotland are pitching in and raising money for Phil Campbell.
A Swedish man who was moving had no room in his new place for the large canvas that had hung on his wall for over a decade, but when he took it to an auction house he learned it was a Russian masterpiece that was valued at over a million dollars.
After a Good News Network story about the first rural diabetes center in the US, which educates and cares for children free of charge in Kansas, a West Virginia children's hospital received a gift of one million dollars to replicate the project there. Both donors are grandfathers whose grandsons have diabetes.
Food banks are trying to keep their shelves stocked as more people in the U.S. struggle to get enough to eat. That means finding new ways to salvage food that would otherwise go to waste. One innovation being tested at the Second Harvest in Tennessee, is a vacuum packaging machine being used to test dented food cans for quality. (NPR)
Stories of people helping each other, often without being asked and demanding nothing in return, were a heartwarming counterpoint to the destruction from unprecedented flooding along the Souris valley in north-central North Dakota. Brought together by word of mouth, church and civic networks, social media and random encounters, those with housing and supplies to spare gave willingly to those without.
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