The Ohio River community of Newport bands together to slow runoff and add greenspace

With the prices of solar technology dropping and the opportunity to save drastically on energy usage and costs, businesses and organizations across the country are investing more in solar infrastructure for their buildings and facilities. The Better Buildings Initiative of the US Department of Energy is helping by providing guidance and documenting effective approaches and financing for renewables installations - from hotels, to schools, to big box retail.

In Uganda, religious leaders and anti-gay individuals have been very vocal against the LGBTI community and have disowned many LGBTI religious leaders. This has led some of these leaders to publicly come out and advocate for others and speak of their own experiences, showing the possibility of being LGBTI and religious.

In a rapidly gentrifying Mexico City neighborhood, two artists refurbished an icon and set up an altar for Santa Mari La Juaricua, a saint to protect residents from eviction. The saint raises awareness and acts as a reminder about housing issues and the icon has been taken up by the residents and has been used in processions and protests.

The consumption of meat and dairy has long been deemed a leading cause of climate change, yet production continues to rise. To contribute to environmental sustainability, Dale Vince – owner of the U.K.’s Forest Green Rovers soccer team – has achieved the status of having the world's first carbon neutral team. From vegan-only menus to a solar-powered grass-cutter, the organization is bringing light to this topic in front of a new audience.

Pennsylvania law is preventing a Philadelphia neighborhood from converting an empty lot into a solar farm, but community members are working to fight against this by citing neighboring states that are seeing positive impact from similar projects. One such project is in Massachusetts where shared solar energy systems is helping to offset "80 percent of the power needs of a nearby assisted living facility, an affordable housing development, a family-owned hardware store and a non-profit serving those with disabilities."

The South Central Leadership Academy was started in Los Angeles by a college student who believes that gun violence survivors like him should lead the community response in finding solutions to violence. Its first year of paying more than a dozen student survivors to learn community organizing skills succeeded in attracting funding to expand to Nashville, Baltimore, and Atlanta. COVID-19 put the latter two expansions on hold, but LA and Nashville continued with well-attended classes learning remotely. Founder Marco Vargas hopes to turn this startup into a national network of youth leadership academies.

The Women’s Collective is a nonprofit that works with more than 10,000 subsistence farmers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to promote food security using millets, a crop resilient to drought and climate change. For Pavitra, one of those farmers, she began cultivating the ancient grains in 2015 and now has more than enough food to feed her family year-round. However, there’s a lack of public investment in millet production and machinery. And there’s no unified effort to create demand for millets: Some state governments lead the charge and in other states, it’s led by grassroots organizations.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a white mob killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed the thriving neighborhood of Greenwood, the Centennial Commission supported a number of initiatives to learn from the past and build a better future. At the base of an ancient elm tree that witnessed the massacre, Up With Trees distributed 100 elm seedlings to children to plant around Tulsa. The commission convinced state education officials to develop a new curriculum on the massacre for K-12 students.

A New York-based nonprofit called Students for a Free Tibet is training Tibetans in "how to stage nonviolent protests." This effort, in conjunction with other Tibetan NGOs, has helped activists in Dharamsala, India to become "more organized, media savvy and technologically sophisticated," which in turn has increased the number of people who have come together to participate in the nonviolent protests.

As building developers in Kenya design new structures that are more environmentally friendly and sustainable, they can look to the Garden City Mall in Nairobi as a successful example. This mixed-use development with shopping, residential, and office spaces uses solar energy, which helps cut energy costs by over 30 million shillings each year. The mall also was the first in the region to receive an international green building certification.