Henry Richard, the brother of the youngest victim in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, has completed the Boston Marathon in honor of his brother. He was emotional as he completed his first Boston Marathon. As he neared the end of the race, an emotional Richard stopped at the Boston Marathon memorial on Boylston Street for several moments. He then turned and ran to the finish, pumping both fists in the air as he crossed the line.
Henry ran with Team MR8, to raise money for the Martin Richard Foundation, which promotes inclusion, kindness, and peace in Martin’s legacy. The foundation invests in community programs that broaden horizons for young people and encourage them to celebrate diversity and engage in positive civic action.
Henry was 10 years old when his 8-year-old brother Martin was one of three people killed that day. Hundreds of people were injured that day including his 6 year old sister Jane who lost her left leg in the bombing. Jane survived that day after Matthew Patterson, from Lynn Fire Department, grabbed a stranger’s belt and made a tourniquet for her. Patterson then lifted her into his arms and raced through the devastation carrying her with her father, Bill Richard, by his side.
His sister, Jane, his parents and other family members were there at the finish line. “It’s great to get here finally. It’s been years in the making for me so I’m just so happy I could finally be here. I know Martin would have been doing it with me — so happy to finish it, that’s all I can think about. So many people were out there for me, all my friends, my family. Motivation was the least of my worries. There were so many people there to support me. It was wonderful and I couldn’t believe it. It meant the world to me that they were here waiting.” Henry said.
Finishing the Boston Marathon is an incredible achievement by itself, but crossing the finish line meant even more to Henry Richard. It also brought back a lot of emotions for the entire Richard family. Henry plans on running the marathon again in the future. “I love this city and I couldn’t be more grateful to them and everything they’ve done for me,” he said.
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When a Georgia teen learned that babies staying in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) only received two hours a day with their parents during the pandemic, she knew she wanted to help provide some extra comfort to the infants. Bryn Hammock, 18, a Girl Scout since she was in kindergarten, had been looking for an inspiring project to help her earn the Gold Award, the organization’s highest honor, and knew helping NICU babies was the right choice.
Hammock’s grandmother, a pediatric nurse, told her about hand-shaped gloves filled with beads often placed with NICU babies, so the infants feel like their mothers are holding them. Preemies in the neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) need a touch from mom or dad, but when parents can’t be there, “Tiny Hugs” are a good substitute.
The soft, snuggly mittens, weighted inside with a pound of poly bead stuffing, are used to help these early arrivals feel like they’re still in the womb. Mothers are asked to wear the glove close to their own bodies so the fabric will retain her unique smell, which is calming to an infant. And the weighted hands are also helpful for holding tubes and assorted wires in the hospital.
Some hospitals in the Atlanta area had the gloves, but the facilities near Bryn were looking for more. Despite not knowing how to sew and the lockdown just starting, Hammock set her sights on helping the NICU babies. She raised funds for all of the sewing supplies and created a pattern for the stuffed gloves — which she calls Tiny Hugs.
Hammock spent a year learning to sew and gathering a team to make weighted mittens. The teen crafted several Tiny Hugs herself and with her mom’s help, created a how-to video so that a team of 18 volunteers could help make even more. The volunteer team planned to make 30 Tiny Hugs but ended up sewing 140. Bryn distributed the gloves to seven Georgia hospitals, including the one where she was born.
Bryn received several thank you letters from hospitals that received her team’s Tiny Hugs and the project earned her the Girl Scouts’ Gold Award. Bryn says “It felt really good to earn the award doing this. I’m the third generation girl scout and the third in my family to do it. I love babies and kids, so this was just a perfect project for me. It felt really good.” The high school senior will head to Auburn University in the fall and plans to do something in the medical field.
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Stefany Bibb, a teacher at John F. Kennedy Montessori Elementary School in Louisville started the “Kindness Crew” to combat the Monday morning blues. The group lines the entrance of the school every Monday to help cheer up students. With something as simple as a morning greeting and kind words, they hope to change the direction of someone’s day.
Students in the Kindness Crew often hold the door for others, greet students and teachers each morning with posters that have positive messages, focus on being helpful and respectful, and help others to remember to be kind. Every month, the ‘Kindness Crew’ also chooses an act of kindness to perform somewhere in the community. Bibb hopes these students take the foundation of kindness they’ve started at Kennedy Montessori and continue to build upon it in the future.
During spring break, Bibb and several students in the Kindness Crew created a rock garden outside of the school’s building of painted rocks with messages of kindness or happy designs.
Students can keep the rocks for up to one week before returning them to the garden. If students choose to keep the rock longer, they can paint another one and replace the one they took.
Bibb said kids genuinely have a kind heart and she just wants them to keep it. “Nothing you’ve heard from any of the students, nothing they do, is because of me. I just gave them the outlet to do what they naturally do. They’re naturally kind. There’s nothing I can take credit for, for how amazing they are and the kindness they spread. I’m just like, ‘Here, do what you do’” Bibb said.
John F. Kennedy Montessori Elementary was one of seven schools recognized for best practices during the 2021 Continuous Improvement Summit for the Kindness Crew. Each winner was presented with a $500 check that can be used toward school improvement.
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An Iowa woman, Alli Marois, 23, was overwhelmed with the response when she posted a video on TikTok asking for help for a project. Her father, Bill Collins, had recently retired from the Des Moines Fire Department in September after 38 years. She wanted to make a special birthday gift for his 61st birthday coming up in August and turned to TikTok to make it happen.
In her video that she posted in February, she explained that she wanted to make a quilt from shirts featuring logos of fire stations all across the U.S. She said “ He really is passionate about being a firefighter. That’s the one thing that he’s loved. If someone was born to do something, my dad was born to be a firefighter. My dad is one of my number one supporters and he … he is really one of the best men in my life and I wouldn’t trade him for anything.”
Marois said throughout her childhood, whenever her family traveled, her father would get a T-shirt from the local fire department. Since he hasn’t had the chance to visit all 50 states, she realized a quilt would be a great gift. She had written letters to fire departments but had not received shirts from all 50 states before turning to TikTok with her plea. “So firefighters of TikTok, I’m asking you for your help to please send me a shirt from your state,” Marois said in her video. “I would love all of you to be a part of this journey.”
Marois has since received T-shirts from all 50 states and more. She has 100 shirts and counting, including a few from overseas fire departments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Along with the shirts, Alli Marois has received handwritten letters from firefighters and from widows of firefighters who died on 9/11. She said “As soon as all of these shirts started to come in, I got very emotional because people are helping someone they don’t even know. They’ve never met me, they’ve never even talked to me.”
She posted a video update, that she is now in the process of cutting the shirts to make the quilt. She added that she will post a reveal video when the quilt is finished and presented to her father. Marois has received a lot of attention online, which meant she couldn’t keep the entire project a secret from Collins. She said some aspects are still a mystery, he hasn’t seen all the shirts so he won’t know what it’s going to look like and he has not read the letters. Marois says it has been a “heartwarming” and “very humbling experience.”
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A New Jersey community raised $157,000 for a former Marine and retired mailman who lost everything in a house fire. World War II veteran Paul Roberts’s house caught on fire on March 14th and while the 94 year old escaped to safety at his neighbor’s house, the only items to survive the blaze were a collection of his photo albums. Roberts, who went to Nagasaki with the Marines after the United States dropped the atomic bomb there, has received a lot of support to help put his life back together.
His neighbor, retired firefighter Rich Obermayer, shares a bond with Roberts. Rich’s daughter, Erin, also became close with the veteran when they got to spend more time together during the pandemic. The fire isn’t the only tragedy Roberts has experienced. He lost his daughter, Joan, to a rare disease, as well as his son, Mark. His home was also flooded in 2007 during Hurricane Sandy, but was eventually restored. Erin and her father decided to help Roberts by creating a GoFundMe page to help him recover.
The GoFundMe explains “At 94, Paul knows he only has a short time left with us. He was hoping he could stay in his home until his death, as he has been a staple here in Ship Bottom for over 50 years. With the rising cost of Property taxes, he was barely able to pay his tax bill with his pension. He survived Covid in March 2021, probably because of all the walking he did as a mailman. Paul would like to be able to end his time here on earth in his favorite place. He had insurance, but because the house was so old, most of the construction was out of code. Within three days the town notified him that he must have the house torn down. We are hoping with crowd source funding, we can give him the resources to help him in rebuilding a new house.”
The organizers of the GoFundMe say most of the donations came from people they don’t know as Marines from all over the country have given donations. Roberts’ neighbors are now hoping to raise enough money to provide him with financial support. Neighbor Richard Obermayer said
“He’s the whole neighborhood, he’s like the mayor and has always had such a positive outlook.” Roberts is grateful for everything his community and the many people online have done for him.
“There’s a lot of good people in this world, I found out. I don’t know what I would have done without them. I appreciate everything. God bless you all” Roberts said.
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A Japanese-American interment camp from the Second World War in Colorado has been folded into the care of the National Park Service. As a new National Historic Site, the Amache Internment Camp is now part of the Service’s commitment to tell the entire story of American history. The camp has been preserved for years by local students,the Amache Preservation Society (APS), a group of volunteer students from the local school district in southeast Colorado, led for 30 years by John Hopper.
Hopper, a social studies teacher in 1993, was teaching some students who turned a one-time class project speaking with a survivor of the camp into a preservation society. The focus was on giving class presentations, operating a museum, and maintaining the site—which holds a large collection of government-issue barracks where thousands of Japanese Americans were detained. According to the National Park Service, the center was more commonly known as “Camp Amache.”
It was one of 10 centers constructed in the US during World War II for the purpose of interning Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent. More than 10,000 people passed through Camp Amache and it housed over 7,300 internees at its peak. Two-thirds of those housed were U.S. citizens. Now, the Granada Relocation Center site consists of a cemetery, a monument, building foundations, and landscaping. Hopper is now Dean of Students but students from the same school still run tours of the site, mow the lawns, and even pursue occasional excavations under the supervision of the University of Denver.
The APS works on presentations to other schools; in recent years, also began organizing trips to Japan to stay with host families and do their presentations in Japanese high schools. In 2006, Amache was designated a historic landmark and was recently designated a National Historic Site. The new designation transfers the responsibility and ownership of the town of Granada to the National Park Service. National Park Service Director Chuck Sams said “The National Park Service will continue working closely with key stakeholders dedicated to the preservation of Amache, including the APS, to preserve and interpret this significant historic site to the public.”
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Gamers and the video game industry are renowned for being extraordinarily generous with fundraisers for many charities. Several game companies have been raising funds and pitching in millions for Ukrainian relief programs. Epic Games, the developer of the hugely successful video game Fortnite, has revealed it’s raised $144 million.
On March 20th, in conjunction with Microsoft’s Xbox, the firm pledged to donate all of its proceeds from the game to Ukraine relief efforts for two weeks. The charities receiving the funds include UNICEF, Direct Relief, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program.
Epic Games, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, announced the fundraising effort on the same day it released a new season of Fortnite Battle Royale and raised $36 million in the first 24 hours. The fundraising window closed on April 3, shortly before they announced the grand total of donations raised.
Epic’s fund raising campaign follows Humble Bundle – a firm that sells video game bundles online – raising $20 million for Ukraine relief efforts last month. Humble Bundle’s pay-what-you-want model for their game, book, and course bundles have raised more than $200 million through 12 million purchases. Their donations have benefitted charities such as Make a Wish, One Tree Planted, the ACLU, Girls Who Code, and Charity: Water.
Microsoft, the makers of Xbox, committed over $35 million to support humanitarian assistance and relief efforts for Ukraine. Microsoft is also matching employee donations by 2:1, resulting in more than $13.5 million raised to date in support of organizations working both within Ukraine and supporting refugees who have fled to neighboring countries.
From March 5 to March 12, League of Legends developer Riot Games donated all proceeds from battle pass sales for VALORANT, Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift, as well as the new Bee skin line in League of Legends, will be donated to support humanitarian relief efforts in the region. They raised over $5.4 Million and in addition to the player supported fundraiser, donated $1M across three humanitarian nonprofits; International Medical Corps, Doctors Without Borders and Polish Red Cross.
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The teen driver from a viral video of his truck being tossed and flipped around in a tornado has been gifted a brand new truck. Just days after 16-year-old Riley Leon’s fateful crossing of paths with one of more than a dozen twisters that struck Texas Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet dealership in Fort Worth, Texas announced they were giving him a brand new vehicle.
In the video captured by a passerby, a funnel cloud and debris spin around Leon, his red Chevrolet Silverado is flipped on its side, rotated around once, and then flipped back upright again — and Leon continues driving. Leon had been interviewed by local news outlets and said he had just finished applying for a job at Whataburger.
“Everything was going good, it was a nice good day for me, then, out of nowhere, the twister came. It just happened so fast. It looks like I drove off but in reality I didn’t; I just landed in the center of the road and I was just driving to get off on the side of the road” he said. Elgin Police Dept. Commander Aaron Crim, said he spoke to Leon after the incident and asked Leon if he was okay. “He just kinda shook his head and didn’t really answer me. After seeing the video, now I understand why he had just come out with a blind stare,” Crim said. “He was probably scared to death.”
Leon’s truck was totaled but he appeared to be okay. Leon originally did not go to the hospital after the incident, because the family does not have health insurance and nothing appeared to be physically wrong with him. Unfortunately, he began to experience body aches and severe back pain, as one would expect after, after the shock wore off.
When he went to school he ended up leaving early due to severe back pain so Leon’s mom came to pick him up and took him to the hospital. The doctors found fractures to the teen’s back. A GoFundMe set up by Leon’s school nurse for his medical bills surpassed its goal of $30,000-raising over $43,000 so far.
When Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet heard of Leon’s story on the news they decided to give him a new one. Riley and his family have received a brand new 2022 Chevrolet Silverado LT All Star Edition in Cherry Red along with a $15,000 check that was presented to him. The dealership made the announcement on their Facebook page “We are thankful Riley is safe, commend his driving skills during a frightening situation, and our hearts are with other families in Texas that have been affected by these storms.”
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An Atlanta teen is raising money for a friend’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury during a football game. Marcos San Miguel and Jordan Sloan have been best friends since 6th grade. The two bonded over their love of sports, San Miguel is a star on the basketball court and Sloan on the football field. Sloan was 15 when he took a hit in the 3rd quarter of the homecoming football game at Pace Academy in September 2020.
Sloan walked off the field but was rushed to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta where he underwent brain surgery. Jordan had suffered a very rare brain stem injury that made it difficult for doctors to give a prognosis for his recovery. He would remain hospitalized there for the next several months before being moved to the Shepherd Center for rehabilitation.
His recovery has been a long road from being on a ventilator and unable to blink to doing rigorous physical therapy and taking virtual classes back at school. Sloan goes to rehabilitation sessions 6 days a week to regain his mobility and strength-with the goal of being able to one day play sports again.
San Miguel has been by his best friend’s side cheering him on and found a way to support him through basketball. San Miguel began taking pledges for every charge he took in a basketball game, in order to give Sloan’s family the money necessary to buy items not covered by insurance, like a manual wheelchair and reformer machine. He said “I really just wanted to do whatever I could to help. He would have done something similar for me.”
So far, he has raised over $14,000 through his fundraiser “Take a Charge for Jordan Sloan”. The remainder of all funds raised will go to Shepherd Center for their Adaptive Sports program.
San Miguel hopes that once Jordan has a manual wheelchair and reaches a few new therapy goals, he can arrange for a wheelchair basketball game for Jordan and some of our former teammates. Sloan’s mother, Jasmine Jamieson said she is grateful for the way San Miguel has stepped up to help and while she doesn’t know if she will ever be able to really thank him- she will try for the rest of her life.
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Army Sgt. Christopher Kurtz, was serving in the 101st Airborne Division in Afghanistan in 2010 when an IED went off nearby. Kurtz, who lives in TN, lost both of his legs and two fingers. After many surgeries, Sgt. Kurtz returned to active duty before medically retiring from the Army in 2013. He was recently honored with the keys to his new specially adapted smart home, courtesy of the Gary Sinise Foundation.
He received a brand new “smart home” that has been customized to make living easier for Kurtz. The foundation built him a four bedroom, three bath home with an open floor plan, wide hallways, low counter tops, and smart technology to control everything in the home with the touch of an iPad. The house was provided to the Kurtz family mortgage free by the Gary Sinise Foundation program R.I.S.E. (Restoring Independence, Supporting Endowment), which builds specially adapted smart homes for our nation’s most severely wounded veterans and first responders, their caregivers and families.
A “Walls of Honor” ceremony was held at the site of the house in Adam, TN to celebrate handing the keys to Kurtz. In a video prepared for the event, Sinise said “The house that stands before you today is a small symbol of appreciation and respect from a grateful nation.” Mike Thirtle, CEO of the Gary Sinise Foundation said “We want to make it as customizable and tailorable for them and their family. So when you go inside the home you’re going to see countertops lowered and you’re going to see a Dutch oven that opens a certain way. You’re going to see a sink where they can wheel up with their wheelchair to have access. You go to the bathroom and you see how it’s easier for them to get around because there’s a lot of wheelchair considerations.”
Sinise, who played wounded war veteran Lt. Dan in the movie Forrest Gump, said that experience opened a whole new world for him. For the past 10 years, Sinese has been providing mortgage-free homes for veterans through his foundation. “Shortly after the movie opened, I was contacted by the Disabled American Veterans Organization inviting me to their national convention where they wanted to present me with an award,” Sinise said. “I met hundreds if not thousands of people who were not playing a part in a movie.”
Sgt. Kurtz said the home has changed his life. “I am incredibly grateful to the Gary Sinise Foundation, not only for what they do for the military community, but for changing my life with this home that will help restore my independence and make life easier for our family. This place is awesome, it’s going to be a great place to grow the family, my kids are going to be in great schools, this entire community is very supportive. I can’t ask for more, this is an incredible opportunity, and I can’t be more thankful, it’s just a blessing,” Kurtz said.
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