Adriana Alvarez
Day-shift McDonald's worker and single mother Adriana Alvarez has become a key leader of the Fight For Fifteen minimum wage movement, both here and abroad, joining a long line of often unsung wome...
Aleita Cook
17-year old Aleita Cook is taking on the federal government over a rebuilding essential for our democracy--universal K-12 civic education--and, in the process, illuminating stark and dangerous dispari...
Ally Bain
The 14 year old from the Chicago suburbs who turned a moment of shame and embarrassment into sweeping change across the country......
Amanda Needham et al
New Yorker Amanda Needham learns that sometimes a protest sign becomes more than just a sign.. ...
B.R. Ambedkar
By political miracle, the father of the constitution of one of the world's ten most rigidly class-based nations, India, came from its lowest caste...
Barbara Rose Johns
Too young to know better? A puppet of adults? Tell that to Barbara Rose Johns, a high-school junior who shut down her school and spurred one of the most important cases in Supreme Court history......
Ben Bernanke
Big crises can make even the most powerful seem like they're struggling to move mountains like the rest of us, and just as unappreciated for doing so...
Bob Lee, Fred Hampton
The diversity movement traces its origins to the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, Illinois, where it began more than a decade earlier than popularly believed, led by two Black Panthers...
Civic Engagement Champions
Four pioneering middle school educators who became the first nationally recognized civic engagement champions are inspiration and models for us all....
Cyrus The Great
Cyrus The Great not only inspired our founding fathers, but in many ways, two thousand+ years after his rule, is still ahead of our time. To claim that Donald Trump is the Cyrus of anything is a calu...
Dan Price
In 2016, CEO Dan Price took a dramatic pay cut to insure every employee in his company was making at least $70,000. Three years later, business is booming, and he's helping mom-and-pops take on the ...
Daryl Davis
For decades, Daryl Davis has been reaching out over the hardest and highest barriers of all in daily American life......
E.F. Schumacher
He hated the title of his most famous book, b/c he was sure it would become a catchphrase. Happily he was right, but Small Is Beautiful is only a small part of his vision for a century he would never ...
Emma Picton-Jones
In his suicide note, her husband told her what to do. Now Welsh housewife Emma Picton-Jones is solving a problem that afflicts the heartland on both sides of the Atlantic......
Fabian Saieg, Leandro Lima, Leandro Miguez
They never really outgrew Legos; now three young men from Cordoba, Argentina--Fabian Saieg, Leandro Lima, and Leandro Miguez, co-founders of the Ecoinclusion Foundation--are making affordable housingÂ...
Fred Rogers
Every American should see Won't You Be My Neighbor? And read this extraordinary profile of arguably the humblest, most d...
Global Teacher Prize
Teachers are changing the world all over the planet, and the world is taking notice: read the remarkable stories of the first five winners of the $1M Global Teacher Prize, and 250 finalists, for hours...
Greta Thunberg
Sixteen year old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, still a teen at heart, has become the unlikely leader of the ultimate rebellion of the powerless--the world's children--in the fight of their lives, f...
Jackie Corin
Meet Jackie Corin, the teenage organizational mastermind behind the Parkland kids' efforts to change the course of our elections, and with them the terms of debate over gun control......
James McBride & Ethan Hawke
Sometimes we need to review our judgments on historical figures for resonances with the present day. The author James McBride decided the abolitionist John Brown was such a personage...
Janet Yellen
One of the great ironies of what's already being called "the lost decade" is that it featured the longest period of unbroken economic growth in our history. The person who deserves the most credit is...
Jeff Bulington
One of the last groups some still seem to feel it's OK to make the butt of jokes are poor white rural southerners, but after a unique teacher from Memphis, Tennessee made a pilgrimage to Mississippi, ...
Matt Souza
A Washington, DC-area pastor is taking the educator's dictum, 'go where they are,' to virtual extremes--and changing lives in our increasingly digital, corporately over-determined world......
Nuns & Nones
Secular millennials and Catholic nuns are living and learning to fight for social justice together in the Nones and Nuns program now spreading rapidly across the country...
Phil Mick
An Indiana fifth grader who's been mercilessly bullied about his appearance--to the point of contemplating suicide--gets support from an unexpected source on his first day back in school.....
Robert Owen
Often considered progenitor of British socialism, Robert Owen might be better thought of as patriarch of modern business management, lifelong education, the ideal of small-scale self-sufficiency e...
Sammie Winners
Just doing your job can be 21st century citizenship if you're in public service; pandemic optional. The Samuel J Heyman awards honor the nation's top civil servants--these are their stories...
Serenity Park Parrots
In an incongruously-named southern California locale called Serenity Park, a rollicking community of parrots is helping war veterans deal with PTSD...
Shaheen Mistri
She left Tufts University at the age of 20 to start a non-profit to educate underprivileged children in her birthplace of Mumbai. But she was just getting started...
Shawn Healy
Quietly, the McCormick Foundation's Shawn Healy has become a driving force and orchestrator behind the leading edge of the civics education revival...
Steve Case
Revolution's Steve Case is seeking to spread high tech investment far beyond Silicon Valley, leveraging the strengths of the forgotten small cities and towns all across America the 21st century's been...
The Africtivists
In the world's most hostile environment for democracy, two hundred activists in 30+ countries are coordinating what they hope will be an African Spring for democratic reform...
The Immigrants
They started their American journey from zero, contributed found value to our country, and inspired us with their stories of how far they'd come...
The Service Workers
Just as 9/11 reintroduced America to its first responders, our oft-forgotten service workers have proven to be the unsung heroes of the COVID pandemic...
William Boyajian
Those street musicians on the corner may not be who you think, at least not in New York City, thanks to an immigrant from a small town in upstate New York......