something to celebrate...

🎉 Today is Maya Angelou’s birthday! Angelou was a renowned poet, author, and activist who dedicated her life to fighting for civil rights and equality.

🎈 A belated “Happy Birthday” to another icon: Jane Goodall turned 91 years old yesterday, and the state of Colorado honored her with, you know, just a little brand new holiday.

🏀 Women’s March Madness is back on tonight with UCLA vs. UConn — the latter, by the way, is making Final Four history with their 24th appearance (for the men, North Carolina has the most with 21).

Food

After 900,000 meals were canceled due to USDA cuts, volunteers flooded a Delaware food bank with donations

Cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture have impacted food banks, farmers, schools, and students across the country — and in Delaware, volunteers are assembling to fill those gaps.

Organized by elected officials and the Food Bank of Delaware, an emergency donation drive was held at various food bank locations, with one drop-off event collecting more than 5,000 pounds of food donations.

The USDA cuts eliminated around 750,000 pounds of food for the food bank, which would have amounted to 900,000 total meals for people in need.

Why is this good news? Food Bank of Delaware feeds thousands of Delawareans annually — and their services were especially critical right now, with increasing demand due to higher grocery prices and stagnant wages.

While seemingly small, seeing the community come together to take good action is inspiring and will make an incredible impact, ensuring people who need food can access it.

→ Read more​

More Good News

​A Long Island man became the first in the history of New York to be cured of sickle cell anemia. A groundbreaking treatment used Beauzile’s own bone marrow in IV transfusions to create normal red blood cells.

​Thanks to the Academy Award-winning film “Flow,” there’s been a surge in black cat adoptions. Black cats and dogs have historically low adoption rates for a number of reasons: ancient superstitions that they were bad omens or bad luck, they don’t photograph as well in adoption photos, and more.

​With wind power more than doubling since 2020, Finland is “ahead of schedule” on phasing out coal. The closure of a coal power plant in Helsinki brought coal to less than 1% share of the country’s energy mix four years ahead of schedule.

​A former middle linebacker and student at MIT is working to design a safer football helmet for players at all levels. And he’s succeeding: LIGHT Helmets’ new Apache helmet line was ranked the highest-performing helmet ever in safety tests by Virginia Tech’s renowned helmet-testing lab.

Homelessness

Realtors, organizations, and government officials collaborated to create a ‘homelessness dashboard’ to make it easy to help those in need

→ Read more​

People doing good

Volunteers in the Bay Area are building DIY benches for bus stops that don’t have anywhere for people to sit

Software engineer Mingwei Samuel saw a post from Darrell Owens on social media: it was a photo of Owens’ neighbor, who’d just had surgery, sitting on a curb at a bus stop because there was nowhere for him to sit.

Samuel got to work building a bench of his own, and posted a photo of it at the bus stop — and the post went viral, gaining more than 100,000 likes.

Samuel and Owens then teamed up to create a guerrilla bus bench-building movement called the SFBA Bench Collective in the East Bay area, installing benches of their own at bus stops lacking the essential infrastructure.

→ Read more​

Good Quote

→ More inspiring Maya Angelou quotes to read on her birthday​

More Good bits

🚂 What is this, Platform 9¾?​

🐾 The goodest boys and girls are doctors’ best friend, too.

🛠️ Rosie gets the recognition she deserves.

🦁 An exciting update on the world’s largest wildlife crossing!

🧸 Time to unpack those childhood storage boxes.​

What’s good?

I’ll show my cards: I’ve got UConn going all the way in this year’s tournament! Just wish I had a women’s sports bar to go watch at.

Have you been watching the tournament at all?

No time like the present! Reply and tell me if I’ve convinced you to tune in (or if you needed no convincing).

— Megan