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.
Two years ago representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, NASA and the World Bank came together to form the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) program, which steers technology developers toward doing good. Earlier this month, thousands of "hackers for good" gathered in more than 19 different global locations worldwide to participate in Random Hacks of Kindness #3. These teams are now off and running, working with NGO and government advisors to finish their applications for humanity.
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.
An 84 year-old tinkerer has invented many useful items, but all were rejected by every company and investor, until now. A small company agreed to invest in a word game he came up with called "Dabble," which is now sold in 50 stores nationwide and won the 2011 Game of the Year Award from Creative Child Magazine.
Over the weekend, a Southern California student who thought he was destined to live life in a wheelchair triumphantly walked across the stage at commencement with the help of mechanical braces and motorized joints directed by a computer brain.