Inspiring News Stories
Excerpts of Highly Inspiring News Stories in Major Media

Below are one-paragraph excerpts of highly inspiring news stories from the major media. Links are provided to the original stories on their media websites. If any link fails to function, click here. The inspiring news story summaries most recently posted here are listed first. You can explore the same list with the most inspiring stories listed first. See also a concise list providing headlines and links to a number of highly inspiring stories. May these 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.

There are all kinds of enormous, impressive and, frankly, noisy machines at work across the 20,000 square meters of industrial warehouses at the headquarters of Fagor Arrasate, a manufacturing company in Spain's northern Basque Country. Fagor Arrasate belongs to the larger MondragĂłn Corporation, which in 2025 had a revenue of â‚Ź11.3 billion ($12.8 billion U.S.) and aggregate profits of more than â‚Ź600 million. Founded by five coworkers in 1956 as a small stove factory, MondragĂłn Corporation is today the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives in the world. It employs more than 70,000 workers across 92 cooperatives ... making it the largest employer in the Basque Country and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. Its grocery-store chain, Eroski, has hundreds of outlets across the nation; the MondragĂłn University offers college degrees; it includes Spain's ... largest producer of bicycles; and according to MondragĂłn's estimates, more than a third of Europe's solar panels use its tech and 60 percent of the world's trains contain its parts. The group, despite being owned by its workers ... is capitalist. Yet MondragĂłn's model has social good and humanism – rather than profit-maximizing – at its heart. The base salary for a MondragĂłn worker is on average 40 percent higher than Spain's minimum wage. On top of that, company profits are shared. From annual earnings, 60 percent is reinvested in the business, 30 percent goes to employees (as capital that can only be claimed once they retire or leave the group), and 10 percent is invested in the local community. In 2025, MondragĂłn allocated more than â‚Ź49 million for projects spanning social inclusion, poverty reduction, education, culture, sports, preservation of the Basque language and environmental sustainability. While cooperative governance may slow business decision-making, studies have found that cooperatives can make as much profit as companies under conventional systems.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on reimagining the economy.