Building Community
Our Theme in November 2019
Grocery startup stocks up Bay Area street fridges with free food
Cheetah is a wholesale grocery delivery startup, but their new side project involves putting street fridges full of food out in the open in San Jose and Oakland, California. The fridges are decorated with paintings of produce and are part of the company’s #FoodGiving Campaign to provide free food Read More...
California fires: How you can help fire victims and firefighters
Wildfire season has descended on Northern California with a vengeance, sparked by lightning, heat, and high winds. With more than half a million acres burned and evacuations in full progress across the Bay Area, many people have begun wondering how they can help. Here are a few options. American Read More...
More pro sports teams are offering up their empty arenas for voting
Back in July, we wrote a story about how the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks was converting its empty arena into a temporary polling station in order to attract local voters. Following Atlanta’s footsteps, another eight major pro sports teams have signed on to a plan to make their home venues available as Read More...
Riverbottoms and Rainforests: Emissaries making an Impact
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead BY AMELIA BUCKLEY Before the pandemic hit, Karin Muller had planned to roadtrip the United States to feature unsung heroes working in their Read More...
Spanish towns are responding to population decline by welcoming migrants
In November 2019, Ángel Márquez and his family abandoned their home in Venezuela’s Barinas province and joined the more than 4 million Venezuelans that have left their homelands due to the economic and humanitarian crises that plague the country. In search of a new home, the Márquez family Read More...
Community fridges are thriving in the age of Covid
In June, we published a story about the emergence of community fridges around New York City. The premise is simple: community members store food in a publicly-accessible fridge, and anyone can come and take what they want and leave what they don’t. The people who came up with this grassroots Read More...
Meet Caesar, the therapy llama calming tensions at protests
Portland has been in the headlines a lot lately after waves of protests led to clashes between police and activists. But even amongst the intensity of the unrest, there were pockets of calm around “Caesar the No Drama Llama." Caesar is a retired 6-year-old Argentine grand champion show llama Read More...
The shame-free guide to encouraging mask wearing
As we shared in an article recently, if just 50 percent of people engaged in handwashing, social distancing, and mask wearing, we would stop the spread of the pandemic. But how do we effectively convince people to do so? Hint: shaming is not the answer. Although it can be tempting to call Read More...
How divers recovered a man’s lost prosthetic leg from the ocean floor
DeWalt Mix was paddle-boarding off the coast of Long Beach, training for the 2021 Paralympic Games in Tokyo when he lost his specialized prosthetic leg. The Fire Department dove right in to try to retrieve it for him, but to no avail. When rescue divers couldn’t find it on Sunday, Mix all but Read More...
The case for relocating small businesses back to residential areas
If you walk around some 1920s-era neighborhoods, it’s not unusual to see a tiny grocery store inhabiting the street corner. This used to be normal in residential areas, but as cars became more widespread, businesses relocated to more centrally-located commercial centers such as malls. The Read More...