Former mayoral candidate and Chicago businessman Willie Wilson donated $200,000 in free gas across the city, causing a massive gridlock in the city. Every vehicle at participating gas stations received $50 until all the money was exhausted. Wilson is donating another $1 million in free gas this week.
Fifty gas stations across the city will participate in the free gas giveaway. Each station is also agreeing to lower their gasoline prices during the event to allow more families to benefit from Wilson’s generosity. The gas will be given out on a first-come, first-served basis starting at 7am Thursday
Wilson said “The need among the community is so great, soaring gas prices have caused a hardship for too many of our citizens. I am confident that with God’s help and wisdom we will get through these tough times together. This is our second gas giveaway in one week. The need is great, I want to help. If I can help somebody as I pass along this way, then my living is not in vain.”
Wilson, was one of the first African Americans to own McDonald’s franchises in Chicago back in the 1970s. He sold all of his restaurants in the 1980s and is president and CEO of Omar Medical Supplies, one of America’s largest distributors of disposable products for use in medical, industrial and foodservice areas.
He is no stranger to making headlines for his philanthropy. In 2018, he handed out checks for $100,000 to homeowners in danger of losing their homes. People lined up at the Cook County Building for checks from the Dr. Willie Wilson Foundation, a nonprofit organization. He also handed out envelopes of cash at a Southside church totaling $200,000.
In 2020, he donated 1 million face masks to hospitals across all 50 wards of Chicago and another 1000 masks to Chicago fire and police departments. Through his foundation, he also sent $100 to 10,000 people through Venmo and Paypal. Homeless people, senior citizens, and those who lost their job due to the pandemic just had to apply for the support.
Read more
In July 2016, just days after two brothers helped their mother and sister escape their abusive father, Lance Hart fatally shot his wife Claire and their 19-year-old daughter Charlotte outside a leisure center in Spalding, Lincolnshire, before turning the gun on himself. The brothers Luke and Ryan, then aged 26 and 25, were working abroad at the time and had finally raised enough money from their engineering jobs to rent a small house for their mother and younger sister.
After the tragedy, the brothers found themselves in the waiting room of the local police station in total shock. Lance Hart had always been a bully who maintained a rule of terror in his household. He monopolized the household finances, taking Claire’s wages and gambling them away. He used the scarcity of money to isolate his family, telling them they could not afford fuel to leave the house or for Claire to meet friends for coffee. Luke and Ryan said he forced them to obey arbitrary rules throughout their childhood. “We had to fill the kettle up to exactly the same level, and if it wasn’t he’d absolutely lose it and yell at us for days” they said.
The ensuing media frenzy compelled Luke and Ryan to dedicate their lives to bring awareness to this type of abuse and help others who face controlling relationships. Posters raising awareness of coercive control, which had become a criminal offense six months earlier, led the brothers to recognize that their father had always been abusive.
They have since collaborated with the charity Level Up, to create media guidelines for domestic violence that “give people’s lives the status they deserve”. They’ve shared their experience with more than 10,000 people in more than 130 speaking engagements. They say helping teachers, the police, social services and NHS staff to gain awareness of coercive control has been heartwarming.
The brothers also give talks to members of the public, and have written a book about their experience, titled Remembered Forever. “Straightforward education of the public can make a massive difference, because domestic abuse victims themselves sometimes don’t recognize what’s happening to them, Luke said “Many safeguarding professionals have told us that they didn’t understand coercive control before, but now they see the dynamics of it, and it’s helped them intervene in many cases that they probably would have passed over otherwise” Luke said.
He and Ryan receive scores of messages from people who want to escape an abusive partner. To address this challenge more effectively, the brothers are developing an e-learning course in collaboration with the US organization Safe and Together. It will launch later this year. “It’s essentially a tool to help victims articulate what they’re going through, so that domestic abuse services can give them the support they need,” Luke says. Above all, the Hart brothers want to create a legacy for their mother and sister, who were devoted to helping others.
Read more
David Rush started breaking Guinness World Records in 2015 before challenging himself to an amazing one-year feat. Rush is in a hurry to set more Guinness World Records, all in the name of promoting STEM education to students. The man who holds 200 Guinness records set out on a mission to set 52 records in 52 weeks last year, and now all that’s left for a handful of them is to be verified by Guinness World Records.
The father of two boys from Idaho has been turning the Guinness World Records into his autobiography for the past seven years as a way to promote STEM education. He has an electrical engineering degree from MIT and works as a senior product manager at Cradlepoint, a technology company in Idaho. He recalled being rejected from a gifted and talented program as a young student, but persevering to get accepted to MIT by pursuing a STEM education.
Rush said “A student will struggle with math or fail a science test and say, ‘I can never become an engineer, it’s too hard, they have this fixed mindset. I wanted to give students this tangible example that if you set your mind to a goal, believe in yourself and pursue it with a passion, you can accomplish virtually anything and that’s when I started breaking records as that tangible example.”
Despite working a full time job and raising two children with his wife Jennifer, who is also an engineer, he has found time to break one Guinness World Record after another. Rush said the hardest of them all was achieving the fastest 100-meter run while juggling blindfolded. The easiest was popping 10 balloons between two people in 15.25 seconds.
Rush has a total of 49 world records recognized by the Guinness World Record with four other records still pending to be verified. “You can develop any skill, talent or ability. You can become better at math, you can become better at science, you can become a better friend, a better conversationalist, or better at breaking Guinness World Records, which is just the example I’m using to make it real for students” Rush said
Read more
NBA star Bismack Biyombo is donating his NBA seasonal salary to build a hospital in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The 29-year-old Phoenix Suns said the donation is in honor of his late father who passed away in 2021. The hospital is being built in their native country and will be named after his father Francois Biyombo .
Biyombo took last season off to care for his sick father, who passed away in August of 2021. Returning to the NBA after a year as a free agent, Biyombo signed a one-year contract with the Phoenix Suns two months ago. He announced he will donate the entire $1.3 million value of his contract to the construction of the hospital in his home town in Congo.
Biyombo said he became aware of just how fortunate he was simply to be able to bring his father to the hospital. Biyombo said building the hospital in his father’s name will consolidate his legacy whilst helping those in need back home. The construction will be carried out through the Bismack Biyombo Foundation, which uses the star’s success as an NBA player to help those in the DR Congo.
During the early pandemic, the Foundation delivered $1 million in medical supplies to hospitals across the country. The Foundation focuses on creating initiatives in athletics, education, and health to increase opportunities for children in the DRC:. The foundation’s work has resulted in 185 annually-granted scholarships, 150 higher education opportunities, and helps over a thousand patients every week receive treatment at Congolese hospitals.
“He was my everything — my friend, my business partner, my mentor and everything. This year, to give my father a gift that will continue to service people, my salary for this season will be going towards the construction of a hospital that will be named after my dad back home to give hope to the hopeless and for those individuals that can not take their family out. The idea is to give them better conditions so that they can somewhat have hope that their loved ones could potentially be able to leave and see another day” Biyombo said.
Read more
A college football player and NFL prospect’s touching act of kindness to a homeless pregnant woman has gone viral. Malik Willis, 22, a senior at Liberty University and a quarterback for the Liberty Flames, was in Indianapolis, Indiana for the 2022 NFL scouting combine when his deed was caught on video by a passerby.
Willis had just left a Nike event where the sportswear brand gifted him a suitcase full of new clothes when he saw a homeless woman and her son sitting on the sidewalk. He stopped and gave her some new shirts — completely unaware that an admirer was capturing the moment on camera from across the street.
The video was shared on Twitter by user Ryan Lacey, who recorded it while Willis’ kind act was already in progress. Willis was spotted on the sidewalk of Indianapolis talking to a person who was sitting on a milk crate and asking passers by for money. The Liberty QB opened his suitcase to hand over clothes to help. The video quickly went viral, and in just a day, it had been viewed over 3.1 million times on Twitter and shared with many commenters praising him for being a good person even when no one is looking.
Willis quickly became the darling of the 2022 NFL scouting combine and was asked about the act later that day on an NFL Network broadcast. ‘I walked past her on the way to the Nike suite and I chopped it up with them and I walked out with a suitcase and whatnot and I felt bad because I saw her son. It was a pregnant lady and she was homeless. And I was just like, “Shoot, I don’t have money, but I can give you a couple of shirts. I just felt like I had to do that. I mean, I’m at a position right now where I’m not worried about much of anything except getting better. So, if I can help her out in any way, I felt like I had to” Willis said.
Read more
A London hairstylist, Joshua Coombes, decided to do a good deed one day in 2015 and sparked a movement across the world. Coombes stopped to speak to a homeless man nearby and ended up giving him a free haircut while they chatted. He decided to keep giving free haircuts and post about it on social media. His social media posts about the people he met began to reach a large audience and the movement that would eventually become #DoSomethingForNothing was born.
Coombes has been telling the stories of homeless people, via offering them haircuts, ever since.
“I started by writing the captions for my photos on Instagram. I was posting before and after photos of the people I met, and the words became important,” he explained. As his posts began to reach more people, Coombes was approached to write the book.
His work caught the attention of Hollywood actor and director Morgan Freeman. National Geographic’s 2017 six-part documentary series The Story of Us, which was presented by Freeman, featured Coombes. In an episode called Love, filmed in south London, Freeman unpicks how love runs through what Coombes does. “Small acts of love can make a big impact,” notes Freeman in the film.
Coombes’ recently published book, Do Something for Nothing, shares tales that cover loss, addiction and abandonment, but also hope, resilience and tenacity. He is now a firm believer in storytelling as a means of creating change. His photos and captions help delve beneath the surface of homelessness, whether by unpicking the reasons why people have ended up in that situation, or simply by telling small details about them.
Coombes has now traveled the world, spreading a message of kindness and inspiring people to use their gifts to help others. The movement encourages people to connect their skills and time to those who need them. Stylists and barbers across the world were inspired to give free haircuts in their community with the goal of using their gift to share a message of kindness. Across the world, people of all skill sets have joined in with Do Something For Nothing as a way to express their humanity; yoga instructors volunteering in rehabilitation centers, students spending time to have lunch with senior citizens, veterinarians offering free veterinary care to the pets of homeless people-even a physiotherapist now offering free back pain consultations.
The Do Something For Nothing movement’s message is simple- If everyone, in every city, did one thing for nothing, we could change the world. This isn’t about raising awareness, it’s about raising compassion. Some issues in this world require donations and financial aid, but others are greatly improved by our sharing time.
Read more
The LEGO Foundation has announced it is donating another 600 LEGO kits to hospitals worldwide for miniature MRI Scanners—to help children cope with the intimidating process of having a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan. The 500-piece sets allow clinicians to help patients understand what the large and complex MRI machine is all about.
The 500-piece sets allow clinicians to help patients understand what the large and complex MRI machine is all about. The model facilitates both role-play and dialogue so that the child feels safe and can build confidence and resilience before the actual journey. By reducing stress and anxiety the LEGO kits also reduce the use of anesthesia.
The idea was started in 2015 as a passion project for LEGO employee Erik Ullerlund Staehr and a Denmark hospital but is now being scaled and piloted with new training material for hospital staff. “I’m extremely proud of this project and the positive impact it’s already had,” said Erik. “I’ve seen first-hand how children have responded to these models; feeling more relaxed and turning an often highly stressful experience into a positive, playful one.”
Close to 100 hospitals across the world have already benefited from the pilot program. Last month, in order to create an even bigger impact, the LEGO Foundation scaled the project by encouraging hospitals across the world to apply for one of 600 models they made available—to be shipped completely free of charge to the hospitals. They opened the application process and received 1500 applications in one day.
The radiology department team at Odense University Hospital has been using the LEGO MRI Scanners as part of their playful learning approach to help over 200 children aged 4-9 annually.
“MRI Scanners make a lot of noise which can be very daunting for children. Our team has found that using the LEGO model has led to more positive, calm experiences for many children. This also benefits the quality of the MRI scan, which relies on the person being very still for up to an hour to work” said Ulla Jensen from the Department of Radiology.
Read more
Thirty years after his final season as a running back for the University of Notre Dame, Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerome Bettis is back at his alma mater to finish his college degree. Bettis “The Bus”, 49, made a promise to his mother to get his college degree 18 years after retiring from a legendary career with the Los Angeles Rams and Pittsburgh Steelers. Now he months away from getting his Business degree and fulfilling that promise.
Bettis left early for the NFL draft after his junior season with Notre Dame and was selected 10th overall in the first round by the Rams in 1993. The NFL’s eighth all-time leading rusher once plowed right through the heart of defenses and is now about to be part of the graduating class of 2022. He already has a Super Bowl ring and will soon add a diploma to his list of accomplishments.
Most of his entire college and NFL career came before most of the current students were born but his classmates all know who he is. Bettis said he is a dinosaur in the sense of school and struggles with the technology but said he’s a much better student because he wants to learn. He said “I promised my mother that I would get my degree. In my immediate family, I’ll be the first person to graduate from college. But most importantly, I have two children. For them to see dad finish a commitment that he set out some 27 years ago, for me to complete that, I think it says a lot to them.”
His mother, Gladys, is a breast cancer survivor who famously starred alongside her son in Campbell’s Chunky Soup commercials in the early 2000s. His father, Johnnie Bettis, died at 61 from a heart attack in 2006. Bettis is the only one of the 21 players from his original football class at Notre Dame who has not gotten his degree and he is looking forward to seeing his mother beaming with pride as he gets his diploma.
Read more
Rihanna’s Clara Lionel Foundation (CLF) and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey joined forces to donate a combined $15 million to 18 different climate justice groups in the U.S. and Caribbean. The recipients of the grants are 18 grassroots organizations within the US and Caribbean that are centered and led by minoritized communities.
Some of the organizations include the Solutions Project, which supports grassroots-level solutions, the Indigenous Environmental Network, which supports Indigenous tribes and communities in protecting sacred sites and natural resources, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, which focuses on tracking and improving environmental threats at the neighborhood level.
Rihanna founded CLF to “support and fund groundbreaking education and climate resilience initiatives” in 2012. One of its first initiatives, which launched a year after the foundation began, raised $60 million for women and children affected by HIV/AIDS through sales from the singer’s lipstick line with MAC Cosmetics. In 2020, it raised $36 million for organizations on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic and another $11 million for programs trying to reform the police and criminal justice systems.
Dorsey started #StartSmall LLC in April 2020 to “fund global Covid-19 relief” and “girl’s health and education, and universal basic income.” He funded the initiative with $1 billion in shares from his fintech company Block, formerly known as Square, which he founded in 2009. At the time, that amount accounted for 28% of the tech giant’s net worth. His initiative has donated over $448 million to more than 250 organizations, including NYU’s Cash Transfer Lab, Water.org and the Malala Fund.
This isn’t the unlikely pair’s first collaboration. Since the beginning of the pandemic, #StartSmall and CLF have donated roughly $57 million to similar causes, as well as natural disaster preparedness resources, rental assistance for low-income families and services for domestic violence victims and survivors. The two entrepreneurs have found common ground in philanthropy, using their wealth to support people left vulnerable by climate change. Their most recent charitable act is in part a response to the devastating hurricanes that have ravaged the home region of the Caribbean in recent years.
Read more
The #BettyWhiteChallenge, launched to honor the passing of the beloved comedic actress, has raised $12.7 million dollars for animal shelters. White died on New Year’s Eve, just weeks before her centennial celebration of January 17th—but because she is so beloved, the campaign took flight to raise millions for animals. Actors & Others For Animals, the charity for which she served on the Board of Directors, launched the campaign asking for donations of $100 for Betty’s 100th birthday.
JoAnne Worley and Loretta Swit were among the celebrities who began a campaign on social media called the #BettyWhiteChallenge in honor of Betty White’s 100th birthday. Almost 400,000 people used Facebook and Instagram to donate to the challenge, raising an incredible $12.7 million dollars for animal shelters and rescuers all over the country—with 100% of the pledges going directly to the organizations. Dozens of other groups also benefited, as the public began sending in money to local shelters in White’s name. Two Philadelphia shelters brought in $100,000; a Los Angeles zoo charity got $70,000; an Arkansas shelter was flooded with over $12,000; and Dubuque, Iowa shelters received $13,000.
Betty White was best known for her roles on “The Golden Girls,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Hot in Cleveland” but she was a self proclaimed “zoo nut,” spending her life advocating for animal welfare. “My preoccupation with animals is an open secret,” she wrote in her 2011 book “Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo.” White’s highest-profile work as an animal advocate was through her longtime relationship with the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association. She was also a trustee of Morris Animal Foundation from 1971-2013. In 2010, she provided the donation that established the Betty White Wildlife Fund in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and sponsored over 30 animal health studies on behalf of the organization.
Betty had prepared a video to share on her 100th birthday which was recorded just days before her death. Her team posted the video on her Instagram page as a farewell greeting for her fans.
“I just want to thank you all for your love and support over the YEARS. Thank you so much, and stick around!” Her team added an update from the #BettyWhiteChallenge to the posted video.
“Good morning! As we continue to see number coming in from all over the world — it’s just absolutely amazing how much money all of you raised for the animals through #thebettywhitechallenge. She could never have imagined such an outpouring of love and would have been so grateful to everyone. When we recorded her special message to fans who attended the movie, we also recorded one that we had planned to put on social media on her birthday. She was using the occasion of her 100th birthday to celebrate YOU – her fans. She knew how lucky she was; she felt the love, and she never took it for granted. I think it’s appropriate to post today as a thank you from Betty and the animals.
Read more
