Rather than lobby the State Board of Education to create reform in the public school system, Steve Barr uses grassroots political tactics to motivate families to demand change. A co-founder of Rock the Vote and former Americorps program manager, Barr founded Green Dot ...
Bob Lenz, co-founder and CEO of Envision Schools, is not satisfied with teaching history and science: he wants students to practice being historians and scientists. That’s why at his schools you are more likely to find a student preparing a multimedia public presentation ...
Jeremy Hockenstein is the son of a Holocaust survivor, a fact that made his first visit to Cambodia in 2000 intensely personal. Much like his mother’s Jewish contemporaries in Nazi Germany, millions of Cambodians had been exterminated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Though ...
When the U.S. economy took a nose dive, and banks cut back on lending, many small American businesses turned to a credit source typically associated with the developing world: microfinance. Microlender ACCION USA, which has lent close to $120 million since 1991, was ...
Acclaimed photographer Phil Borges spent decades chronicling social, environmental and cultural threats and problems around the world. Now he has handed cameras over to young people in 30 countries to tell their own stories. His organization, Bridges to Understanding, links classrooms globally, pairing ...
When the World Bank asked 20,000 of the world's poorest people to list their greatest need, the most common response was a way to express their voice. Jessica Mayberry, founder of Video Volunteers, works to meet this need by training villagers in India ...
We all know that that time of the month is a pain, but who knew that it causes millions of women to lose up to 45 days of work and school every year? And for something as basic as a lack of sanitary ...
Happy Tax Day! Have you ever wondered why don’t we tax Hummers instead of salaries? Or why don’t we list environmental damage as a liability on balance sheets? These are the kinds of questions with which Donna Morton, cofounder of British Columbia’s Centre ...
If a company like Levi Strauss wants to know how well it’s doing, it counts the number of pairs of jeans it sold last quarter. What happens when a grant-making foundation is enlightened enough that it wants to gauge its own performance? It’s ...
While traveling through Uganda in 2004, Matt Flannery and his wife, Jessica, got the idea to use the Internet to connect poor people in need of loans with those in positions to help. Matt talks to Dowser about growing Kiva from four friends ...