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“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” --Mahatma Gandhi
Hello everyone! There is a lot of ‘gentle shaking’ going on that is making a difference in our world these days. This week’s stories remind us of all the many ways that this shaking is happening: a musician is transforming violence through his music; strangers complete labors of love that are left behind by those that died; and Rohingya refugees send aid to earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria. These stories and more are examples of the power of gentle action and their ability to foster change and sustainable well-being in our world. Wishing you gentle strength and may you have a week filled with positive change and well-being!
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Ali Johar
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Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are sending money, 700 blankets and 200 jackets to earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria, to be delivered by the Turkish development agency, Tika. "When we saw the families being saved from the rubble, parents who lost their loved ones, little babies who lost their parents, people struggling for food and shelter, we felt the same pain as our own situation in 2017 after our homes were burnt by the Myanmar military," said photographer Sahat Zia Hero, who helped organize the donations. He said many remembered that Turkish charities were some of the first to help the Rohingya as they fled the massacres in 2017. Amina Khatoun, 56, sold a gold bracelet kept for emergencies. The money raised bought boxes of food, clothes, blankets and baby food. "The people of Turkey stood with us whenever we faced an emergency,' she said. "Turkey has built hospitals in the Bangladesh refugee camps."
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Jonathan Timmes
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Growing up in 1960s Chicago, Daryl Davis didn't understand why white children threw rocks at him, a black child they didn't know, during a Cub Scouts parade. The struggle to understand why they did that helped shape his life as a blues pianist. In 1983, after a performance, a man - who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan - told him he had never seen a Black man who could play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Over the next 30 years, Davis met with white supremacists, tackling prejudices head-on, and believes he persuaded more than 200 KKK members and others to disavow their allegiances. Many became friends, including Scott Shepherd, a former Grand Dragon of the KKK in Tennessee, and they regularly travel together to address racism through dialogue and education. Davis' work is the focus of a documentary and a book. "What Davis showed me is that yelling at someone never in history changes someone's mind," says T.M. Garret.
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Loose Ends
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Karen Sturges was knitting five baby sweaters, one for each grandchild's future baby, when she was suddenly diagnosed with lymphoma. She worked on the sweaters until four days before she died in 2021, leaving two unfinished. Neither daughter Annie Gatewood, 53, or her sister knew how to knit. Then Gatewood was matched with a "finisher" through a group called Loose Ends. Sarah deDoes, 86, a lifetime knitter, finished knitting the two tiny sweaters. Loose Ends was started by friends and avid knitters Masey Kaplan and Jen Simonic, who know what it's like to have friends reach out about finishing a handmade item left behind by deceased loved ones. Volunteer finishers, in 23 countries and counting, represent a wide range of ages, religions, nationalities and political affiliations."It's a hurting and divided world," said Kaplan, "and this is a tiny way to start to mend it."
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Hubbub
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The Neat Streets campaign, which cut litter by up to 75% per cent in Bournemouth, England in the summer of 2021, won gold for the best campaign of the year at the Global Good Awards 2022, which honours businesses, NGOs and charities that achieve practical, real-world impacts in sustainability. Hubbub, an environmental charity that uses behavioral change research to tackle littering, designed the campaign using data from a six-month litter survey done by environmental monitoring company Ellipsis Earth. Neat Streets used yellow and silver disco bins that played ABBA whenever someone deposited litter, glow-in-the-dark bins in unlit spaces, and 'ballot bins'. Cardiff and Glasgow councils have asked Hubbub and Ellipsis Earth to run similar campaigns, and they are working with the local authority in Bristol to develop entirely new waste management strategies
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Debby Hudson | Unsplash
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Nearly 3,000 employees in 61 companies in the UK recently took part in the four-day workweek pilot program. Companies that participated could adopt different methods to "meaningfully" shorten their employees' workweeks but had to ensure the employees still received 100 percent of their pay. At the end of the experiment, employees reported a variety of benefits related to their wellbeing. Companies' revenue "stayed broadly the same" during the six-month trial, but rose 35 percent on average when compared with a similar period from previous years. Of the 61 companies taking part in the trial, 56 said they would continue to implement four-day workweeks after the pilot ended, 18 of which said the shift would be permanent. A majority of employees who experience the four-day workweek didn't want to go back to the standard five-day workweek. "It feels like I can breathe. It feels like I'm not constantly behind with my family life and feeling guilty and like squashing all of the jobs and errands and everything into two days," said Michelle, a media executive who prefers the four-day workweek.
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