Welcome to today’s episode of Yes to Good News! Today we are featuring good news from March 13, 2020.
First Good News Story from March 13
The first story we are featuring today was featured in Optimist Daily. It’s about a village in Hogeweyk, Netherlands where the world’s first dementia village opened in 2009. This village has been designed to look and function like an old-fashioned, cozy neighborhood. The village consists of 27 houses, each with 7 residents who are free to come and go.
Oftentimes, with dementia, the last part of the memory to go is the part remembering their distant past. Adding to this is that studies now show that reminiscing about past memories can improve cognition, enhance self-esteem and alleviate depression. Hogeweyk was designed with this in mind.
Within the village are gardens, a grocery store, post office, and pub. Each of these are staffed with plain-clothes workers, who happen to be some of the 250 staff members in total that work there. The only restriction for the residents is that they are not able to exit the village. However, they don’t need to. They have all of the freedoms of living in a small village right where they are.
Second Good News Story
Our next story was featured on sunnyskyz.com where we learned that a man named Oscar Dillon had sent hateful tweets to Muslim political candidate, Qasim Rashid. However, Dillon did not get the response he was expecting. Instead of firing back, the Virginia political candidate who is running for Congress did a little research and came to find that Dillon had started a GoFundMe page after depleting his retirement savings on the cost of his wife’s care. Rashid donated to the man’s GoFundMe page and encouraged others through Twitter to do the same.
Apparently responding with kindness was the best approach as Dillon then reached out to Rashid and apologized and asked to meet him. The two have now met and Dillon’s GoFundMe page has received more donations as a result of Rashid’s tweet.
Third Good News Story
This next story was featured on Narcity.com. Canada’s first Coronavirus vaccine which was made in Saskatchewan, is now in testing stages. Yes, I know there are other news stories about coronavirus vaccines. However, I chose this one because of my goofy sense of humor and knowledge that good things are made in Saskatchewan. After all, I happen to come from there myself and I’m fairly certain I was made there because my parents weren’t really ones to travel or take holidays. Alright, enough about that one!
Fourth Good News Story
Today’s final story comes to us from Optimist Daily where we came to learn about 6 foot 5 inches tall former banker, Tony Colley, who had just $278 left to his name after a failed business venture. He went on welfare and became severely depressed. Eventually Colley got a job as a part-time event manager for a catering company in Toronto. While there, he took notice of the amount of excess food that was dumped after each event. The manager allowed staff to take food home after events, but a lot still was wasted.
Colley came across an article that indicated Canada had a $31 billion food waste problem. He started to bike some of the excess food over to a local food shelter. Colley became motivated to create a platform where other food retailers could save their excess food and have it delivered to shelters. Colley launched Be One to Give in May of 2019. Within the program, excess food goes directly from food retailers such as restaurants, food courts, and hotels to shelters within an hour. Retailers pay a monthly fee for the service to have their excess food delivered to a nearby shelter.
Colley’s efforts prove to us that a lot can happen from the efforts of one person!
Thank You!
Thank you so much for watching today’s good news episode of Yes to Good News reported on March 13. We ask that you please hit the ‘like’ button under this video and also subscribe to our channel. When subscribing, be sure to hit the bell notification so that you will be notified of new episodes. The world truly is a great one with many good news stories.
Inspirational Clip of the Day
Be sure to also watch our inspirational clip of the day featured below this video. Today’s clip is from Great Big Story and is about American athlete, Blake Leeper. See you again soon! Thank you for watching Yes to Good News from March 13, 2020!