Everyday Heroes: 50 Americans Changing the World One Nonprofit at a Time

Relief, administering medical care in developing countries. And Abigail Falik, founder of Global Citizen Year, which recruits high school graduates for a year of service and leadership training in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. As she says, “Initiative plus optimism is the recipe.”

I was particularly fascinated to see that so many of these organizations are rooted in their founders’ personal experiences—and especially their past failures. Susan Burton drew on her own turbulent past, including prison time for drug-related crimes, to found A New Way of Life Reentry Project, offering housing and support to women being released from prison. And Anne Mahlum, a veteran marathoner, channeled her passion for running into Back on My Feet, helping homeless people build a sense of accomplishment and control.

There are many moments of wisdom and humor along the way, like Enid Borden’s description of the path that led her to the presidency of Meals On Wheels Association of America: “I was a child of the sixties and back then we all wanted to change the world, but then we grew into the seventies and eighties and we thought, ‘Eh, we’re not gonna change the world too much after all.’ When this opportunity presented itself out of the blue, I decided: I don’t know if I can change the world, but I think I can make a difference in a small piece of that world.”

“We are on the cusp of an epic shift,” wrote Jeremy Rifkin in his 2010 book The Empathic Civilization.

“The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy.” He makes the case that as technology is increasingly connecting us to one another, we need to understand that the most important goal of all this connectivity is to allow us to see ourselves as an extended family living in an interconnected world with responsibilities to one another. The heroes of this book are the embodiment of this age of empathy.

So, if you’ve forgotten Physics 101, here’s a quick refresher. To a physicist a critical mass is the amount of radioactive material that must be present for a nuclear reaction to become self-sustaining. For the service movement, a critical mass is when the service habit hits enough people so that it can begin to spread spontaneously around the county. Think of it as an outbreak of a positive infection. And everyone is a carrier.

What we need to do is go out and carry this positive infection, so that together we can reach that critical mass. And we can start by reading, and sharing, the stories of the heroes celebrated here, who are changing the world, one small piece at a time.

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