TOP OF mind

Dial For Gratitude

Call the Gratitude Circle Hotline for three choices: Listen to the message of the day, leave a message thanking a frontline worker, or text a message of gratitude. With your choice, you can savor a moment of gratitude and share it through messages displayed at hotline.gratcircle. com. Najma Khorrami, founder at Gratitude Circle, says this started as a way to show appreciation to frontline workers and to move toward a more grateful world. “I hope anyone who reads a message shares it and sees the value in it,” she says. “I hope they get a reward from it, a boost in their morale.”

Stories That Spark Wonder

Journalist Ambar Castillo and scientist/writer Brittany Trang are the 2022-2023 recipients of the new Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellowship. Throughout her career, Begley was highly respected for her writing, which appeared in numerous publications,

Welcome Outdoors

including Mindful (her Brain Science column appeared in every issue up to Spring 2021). She was also a tireless mentor to up-and-coming writers. The paid one-year fellowship, with funding raised by Begley’s husband and other donors, carries on her legacy by “diversifying the ranks of science and health journalists and fostering better coverage of science that is relevant to all,” according to STATnews.com.

A new graduate certificate offered through the University of Colorado Boulder aims to equip the next leaders in the outdoor recreation industry with best practices for inclusion and equity, with the goal of making outdoor recreation more accessible to all. Georgina Miranda, a social entrepreneur and activist who is teaching the program’s inaugural course, Foundations of Inclusivity in the Outdoor Recreation Economy, says on the university website: “Cultivating inclusive environments is a daily practice and way of being. It is everyone’s responsibility to create a more inclusive outdoor industry and the world.”

Like The Way You Talk

From “bae” to “side hustle,” Black Americans’ linguistic innovations are widely adopted, but not always recognized. The Oxford Dictionary of African American English, overseen by celebrated historian, literary critic, The

Root cofounder, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is slated to publish in 2025. It will elucidate the variety and significance of African American English—offering, as Gates told The Root, “a history of the African American people from A to Z.”

The Artist Is Out

Conceptual artist Marina Abramović’s latest exploration of present-moment awareness can be found at Modern Art Oxford through March 5, with “Gates and Portals.” Here, visitors don first noise-canceling headphones, then blindfolds, to help them drop into the moment. They’re invited to stand, sit, or lie down to see how a different position changes their experience. An activity sheet notes the gallery has been “transformed…to help us slow down, spend time being quiet, to listen and feel the world around us.”

MONEY WELL SPENT

Amid increased need for mental health support due to COVID-19, a MindfulnessBased Cognitive Behavioral Therapy center in Manitoba received

$700,000 from the province to expand its reach and reduce barriers to services. Norwest Co-op Community Health says the money will help develop online programs and give access to hospitals and community groups. In the coming year, they aim to train 70 to 100 new facilitators and expand their services to include youth aged 14 to 17. The center also received funding to develop programs specifically for health care and public safety personnel, peripartum people, seniors, youth, and Indigenous populations.