Inspiring News Articles
Excerpts of Highly Inspiring News Articles in Major Media
Below are one-paragraph excerpts of highly inspiring news articles from the major media. Links are provided to the original inspiring news articles on their media websites. If any link fails, read this webpage. The most inspiring news articles are listed first. You can also explore the news articles listed by order of the date posted. For an abundance of other highly inspiring material, see our Inspiring Resources page. May these inspiring news articles inspire us to find ever more ways to love and support each other and all around us to be the very best we can be.
While teaching in Uganda in 2010, American college student Kathy Ku noticed that both she and her host family were getting sick a lot from drinking the water. She kept thinking about the problem even after she was back in school at Harvard University, designing a ceramic water filter and getting other students involved. She [then] took a year off to pursue the idea in earnest. Ku wasn’t aiming just to bring water filters into Uganda. She wanted to actually make them there, sourcing the needed clay and sawdust locally. Now, five years after that exploratory visit during her year off, Ku and co-founder John Kye have a full-fledged water filter factory near Kampala. Their organization, Spouts, has grown to more than 40 staffers and distributed about 14,000 ceramic filters, which remove 99.9 percent of bacteria. "There’s this method of cleaning your drinking water by leaving it out in clear plastic bottles in the sun. So I figured, OK, let me try that. I took a swig of the water and essentially spit it back out because it tasted like burnt plastic, and it was really warm," [said Kathy]. "I thought there had to be a better solution that people would actually like to use." Our [new] factory has the capacity to make 10,000 filters a month. We’re closer to 1,500 to 2,000 filters a month now, but ... it has the machinery and the capacity to do a lot more."
Note: Don't miss the National Geographic footage of this amazing project at the link above. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Children are not often invited to speak to the United Nations General Assembly. But there stood Felix Finkbeiner ... with a somber question about climate change. “We children know adults know the challenges and they know the solutions,” he said. “We don’t know why there is so little action.” At the time ... Finkbeiner was four years into leading a remarkable environmental cause that has since expanded into a global network of children activists working [to reforest] the planet. Today, Finkbeiner is 19 - and Plant-for-the-Planet, the environmental group he founded, together with the UN’s Billion Tree campaign, has planted more than 14 billion trees in more than 130 nations. The group has also pushed the planting goal upward to one trillion trees - 150 for every person on the Earth. The organization also prompted the first scientific, full-scale global tree count, which is now aiding NASA in an ongoing study of forests’ abilities to store carbon dioxide. In many ways, Finkbeiner has done more than any other activist to recruit youth to the climate change movement. Plant-for-the-Planet now has an army of 55,000 “climate justice ambassadors,” who have ... become climate activists in their home communities. Most of them are between the ages nine and 12. Meanwhile, he’ll keep giving speeches. “It is in our own self-interest to get children to act,” he says. “At the same time, I don’t think we can give up on this generation of adults. All we can do is push them in the right direction.”
Note: Watch this incredible young leader boldly address the United Nations.
