Last year Ode launched its first annual Intelligent Optimists Issue where we featured people who are not famous yet but should be because of the work they are doing to bring positive change to their communities, their countries, and the world. As part of this special issue, we would like to hear your nominations, too: tales of ordinary people who do extraordinary things. Just tell us who your nominee is and write a few lines explaining why this person is special and why their work is important. Nominate your favorite Intelligent Optimist!
Scott Boylston is a graphic design professor at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, GA. He teaches a variety of classes, and was an advocate in making The Role of Graphic Design in Social Awareness a required course. He recently developed and began to teach new classes that focus on sustainability and serves as a board member on the Chatham Environmental Forum, which has been quietly assisting the community in tackling some of the area’s most challenging environmental issues. Read more...
The social exclusion of disabled people and the opportunity-inequality for education, career, transportation, and leisure facilities they face are a major challenge around the world. 610 million people worldwide are registered as disabled - the millions unregistered left unmentioned. Two thirds of them live in developing countries. The interaction between abled and disabled people is often hindered by stereotypes, fears, avoidance and prejudices. The levels of understanding, support and access to education and jobs vary from country to country.
Even in developed countries like Germany, only about 15% have a job. The prevailing opinion that disability is worth less than normal leads to discrimination and marginalization of the blind and disabled worldwide. The interaction with blind and other marginalized people is still dominated by pity and welfare, and is focused mainly on the deficits of being disabled. There is a lack of understanding in the potential that might arise out of a handicap as well as the fact that disabled suffer much more from the ignorance, information deficit, unequal rights and uncertainty of the abled than from the disability itself. Read more...
In 1999 when Kim Wright began talking about law as a healing profession, most people laughed. In 1999 and 2000 she wrote a watershed website, www.renaissancelawyer.com, which brought together over a dozen different approaches to law under one umbrella and she declared it a movement. While people often stop and shake their heads when law and healing are spoken in the same sentence, Kim is now speaking to mainstream audiences - the National Association of Women Judges in October, 2009 - and she is writing a book for the American Bar Association about this movement. Her message is for a new approach to law practice that is also very old: what if lawyers as wise advisers who help to heal conflict, were peacemakers and problem-solvers? Read more...
Between February 2007 and March 2008, Sean Aiken completed an epic journey around North America, working 52 jobs in 52 weeks. He graduated from college and didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career (or what he wanted to do with his life). Instead of taking the first job that came along, he found a unique way of figuring it out: the One Week Job project.
Here is how it worked: Anyone, anywhere, could offer Sean a job for one week. Any money he earned for the work, he asked the employer to donate towards the ONE/Make Poverty History campaign. Read more...
Brian is a true friend. He has started this amazing website, that makes me smile. Here's his bio. I just love him. Site was created by Brian M Papa, a good guy trying to put a little magic back into the world. Laid off from his job, he flipped gears two weeks later and launched this site to cheer people up. He celebrates life with his wife Ana Paula and their eight month old daughter, Sienna. He shares his (PG-15) family life here. Additionally, he has written for T. Rowe Price. Read more...
Gene is a member of the local legislature - the RTM in Westport, CT. He was the singular catalyst in raising awareness and building a critical mass of support to get legislation passed that outlawed the use of plastic bags at retail stores in Westport. Gene volunteers as an RTM member and is tireless in support of charities, friends, and anyone in need. He recently began a new business with a partner in Asia to develop green products in China.
He is one of the highest energy, most spirited, caring, gregarious and loving people one could ever have the privilege to meet. Read more...
Meeting the force of nature that is Kathy Eldon came about by teaching the story of Dan Eldon. The complete story of that adventure became the front page and center spread of our March 1999 newspaper. You can read it in its entirety this link www.daneldon.org/inspired/jameson/jamesonindex.htm
Thus began our relationship with Kathy Eldon and it is a journey we look forward to every single day. She is an amazing woman who does incredible work in her slain son’s [Dan] name. Kathy sees absolutely no difference in class, race, religion, age, gender or any other bias that people seem to have. The common stereotype is that older people become more impatient and less tolerant as they age. Kathy Eldon is the antithesis of that. I hope that is what you mean by an Intelligent Optimist. She believes in good and therefore generates that atmosphere all around her. Read more...
Barbara Eiswerth has been solving issues of hunger and assimilation for refugees in her home city of Tuscon, Arizona. She has created a network of people to harvest fruit from private gardens to feed thousands with nutritious food.
The Iskash*taa Refugee Harvesting Network uses GPS software set in place by Eiswerth (who has a PhD from the University of Arizona in Arid Lands management) to map the available fruit trees in the Tucson area, while tracking the 12-month harvest cycle. This project has become a model for food banks around the country. Read more...
Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in the world today, and in poor countries it is the number one cancer killer of women. Over 290,000 women die of it every year, yet it is completely preventable. Upon her retirement from her OB/Gyn practice, Dr. Kay Taylor began PINCC (Prevention International: No Cervical Cancer) in 2005 to provide one-visit cervical cancer prevention treatment to women without access to care in developing countries. Read more...
Teresa Clark is co-founder of ENSO Bottles, an environmental company whose mission is to find feasible solutions to the global plastic pollution problem. ENSO Bottles has developed a biodegradable plastic bottle that is non-food based that will biodegrade from microbes active in either a landfill or compost environment. Read more...
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