Good News Headlines 2/22/2023
Formerly homeless, Elizabeth poses with her Miracle Friend Joan / Miracle Messages
Unique Nonprofit To Provide ‘Basic Income’ To California Homeless In 12-Month Study Funded By Google
by Good News Network
A privately-funded program to provide basic income to 100 California homeless people aims to study how the cash—plus one-on-one social support—can be potentially life-changing. ‘Miracle Money: California’ is being funded primarily by a $1.15Mil donation from Google.org and is being evaluated through a randomized control trial led by researchers at the University of Southern California. The pilot, organized by Miracle Messages, will distribute $750 each month for 12 months to 100 individuals experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, San Francisco, and Oakland.
The Right Way To Repair A Mountain
by Geetanjali Krishna, Reasons to Be Cheerful
It’s a bright autumn morning in 2022. We’ve hiked up a steep Himalayan mountainside to a meadow on the old route of the Hindu pilgrimage sites Gangotri and Kedarnath. Dark clouds gather overhead; there is no shelter for miles. “The weather has become increasingly erratic here,” says our trek guide Nawang. “It rarely rains in October, but this year we have seen unprecedented wet weather which has caused these gullies to fill and deepen.” Endeavors to shield nature from such assaults can bring their own problems. What if Uttarakhand officials could find a way to protect the environment, the economy and local communities all at once?
‘We’re Feeding The Kids’: Minnesota House Passes Universal School Meals Bill
by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams
The Democratic-led Minnesota House of Representatives voted Thursday night in favor of legislation to provide free school meals for all students, a move meant to alleviate childhood hunger in a state where 1 in 6 children don’t have enough to eat. The bill, HF 5, provides universal school meals—lunch and breakfast—to all of Minnesota’s 600,000 pupils at no cost. House lawmakers voted 70-58 along party lines in favor of the measure. If approved by the state Senate and signed into law by DFL Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school teacher, the policy will cost the government around $387 million during fiscal year 2024-25, according to estimates.
These Ukrainians Have Managed To Find And Hold Onto Love In A Time Of War
by Natalie Keyssar, NPR
When Lilya Lohyna got the call from her mother that the war had started, she thought it was just hysterics. She hung up. She was accustomed to paranoia about an invasion. She got to the debt collections office where she worked and found it empty. She went home to watch anime. She didn’t believe it until around 2 p.m., when the bombardment of Kharkiv began. She hid in her first floor bathroom and cried. She called her mother, then her friend Maksim, an Azerbaijani student who’d come to Kharkiv to attend university. He made a couple of jokes to calm her down, which only served to make her furious. Sitting on their bed in the apartment they now share, they laugh at the memory.
Researchers Successfully Turn Abandoned Oil Well Into Giant Geothermal Battery
by Andy Corbley, Good News Network
The Biden Administration is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to close abandoned oil and gas wells across the country, but what if they could solve the problem of renewable energy storage instead? 3,000 feet below in a geological structure of porous sandstone, researchers from the University of Illinois deposited excess energy as heated water which could be used to generate electricity in the same way that geothermal power plants function. The Illinois Basin is ideal for oil extraction, but has no subsurface source of heat to produce geothermal power. The same reasons that make it ideal for extracting oil make it perfect for a potential new method of solving the problems with renewable energy storage.
