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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Canine CellMates is a rehabilitative program, designed to help rehabilitate incarcerated men using shelter dogs. Since 2013, the nonprofit has invited inmates at Fulton County Jail to learn to train shelter dogs for adoption in a 10-week program. The dogs get 24/7 socialization and training from the men in a special dormitory for trainers, who can learn valuable life skills as well.
Last year the nonprofit created the Beyond the Bars program: a sentencing alternative that keeps men out of jail. Instead of being incarcerated or proceeding further through the legal system, participants commit to training shelter dogs for a year at a new Canine CellMates facility, leased with a grant from the nonprofit Best Friends Animal Society.
More than 400 men have worked with Canine CellMates and more than 150 shelter dogs have been adopted, according to Susan Jacobs-Meadows, the nonprofit’s founder. The goal is to offer repeat offenders a chance for personal growth. “Once somebody’s in the system once, it’s bad. But once they’re there for the second or third time, their opportunity to get out of and stay out of the system is small. There are almost no resources for those men. Society is done with them… so they’re the ones who really have my heart” Jacobs-Meadows said.
The program is also giving the dogs a second chance. They’re typically pulled from Fulton County Animal Services, an open-intake — and often overcrowded — municipal shelter. Jacobs-Meadows said “The magic of our program is the dogs, they are what starts the process for positive change.” The Canine CellMates team offers long-term support to adopters and supports graduates of its programs.
Jacobs-Meadows stays in touch with many of the program’s graduates who befriend her on Facebook, call or drop by the dog-training facility. Often they have recovered from drug and alcohol addiction, and work jobs, volunteer and reconnect with estranged loved ones. Numerous studies have shown the positive impact of dog-training programs in correctional facilities gives the participants a sense of being connected to a community with training as an act of service while they experience less anxiety and improved mood, leading to lower infraction rates while incarcerated.
Atlanta resident Ray Keith, still participates in the Beyond the Bars and was one of seven men to graduate on Dec. 16, 2021, from phase one of the first class of Beyond the Bars. After a year of participating in Beyond the Bars, his criminal record will be wiped clean. In the meantime, Canine CellMates helped him find a job as a “bark ranger” at a dog park with a popular bar. “Coming from where I’m from, it helped me get a second chance at life,” he said. “The program is definitely giving me a second chance and also giving the dogs a second chance.”
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Last year, “Humans of Bombay” shared a story about an auto rickshaw driver who sold his house to pay for granddaughter’s education. In his interview with Humans of Bombay (HOB), Desraj Ji, 74, revealed that after losing both of his sons, it was the responsibility of providing for his grandchildren and daughters-in-law that gave him the strength to keep going.
Six years ago, his oldest son left for work as usual but never returned. His body was found a week later. Two years later, he lost his other son to suicide. When his granddaughter asked if she would have to quit school, Desraj assured her that she would be able to continue her education. He started working longer hours, leaving home at 6 a.m., driving his auto rickshaw until midnight.
But when his granddaughter said that she wanted to travel to Delhi for a B.Ed course, Desraj knew he wouldn’t be able to afford it on his current income. “But I had to fulfill her dreams… at any cost. So, I sold our house and paid her fee,” he said. His wife, daughter-in-law and grandkids stayed with a relative in their village while Desraj stayed in Mumbai to work and slept in his car.
It was a sacrifice he was happy to make for his granddaughter’s future. “I can’t wait for her to become a teacher, so that I can hug her and say, ‘You’ve made me so proud.’ She’s going to be the first graduate in our family,” he said. The story of Mr Desraj’s selfless deed touched thousands of hearts after it was shared online. Offers of help poured in and his story was also posted on Twitter by the Congress’s Archana Dalmia with an appeal to Mumbai residents to help the auto driver.
A Facebook user named Gunjan Ratti started a fundraiser for Mr Desraj, which exceeded its goal, raising a total of 24 Lahk ($32,000 USD) for him. Thanks to the love and support of internet strangers, the grieving elderly father has a roof over his head and can pay for his granddaughter’s education. The Humans of Bombay page shared a video of Mr Desraj receiving his cheque and thanking his supporters for the love they showered on him.
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When an Instacart shopper decided to go with her gut she may have saved a couple lives in the process. Jessica Higgs, a mom from Georgia, opened up about how she listened to her intuition during a recent food delivery. In a viral TikTok that has garnered over 16.5 million views since being posted on Feb. 1, Higgs talked about the incident.
It started as a normal delivery, ordered by a woman in Atlanta for her dad in Crandall, Georgia. The customer instructed Higgs to leave the bags on his porch. “I got there and something was telling me, ‘You’ve got to help this man out,’” she recalls in the video. “You’re not supposed to go inside someone’s house, but I used my judgment and I brought the groceries inside.”
That’s when Higgs noticed the man was not well. “I could not leave. He just was stumbling all over the place, and there was something different about that,” Higgs said. Higgs said there was a potent smell inside and she noticed a propane tank. She messaged the customer’s daughter to let her know that he “looked sick.” She also mentioned that there was a propane tank in the home and there might be a gas leak since she felt dizzy while inside.
The woman responded that she would have her son stop by to check it out. After the leak was confirmed, the customer credited Higgs with saving her dad’s life, left a five-star review and increased her tip from $14 to $100. In the video, Higgs breaks down while recounting what happened next. “I’m crying because of what she commented this morning,” she says. “‘Thank you so much. Once my son went to check on my dad it turned out it was definitely was leaking, you definitely saved my dad and my younger son’s life!!!”
In the video Higgs says through tears “I’m just an Instacart worker but if you see something, say something. I’m so happy I did.” Hundreds of thousands of people have commented on Higgs’ video praising her for her actions. Instacart also issued a statement praising Higgs’ actions.
“We are constantly inspired by the incredible people who choose to be Instacart shoppers and intentionally make a positive impact in the lives of others. This story touched our hearts and we are grateful for shoppers like Jessica.”
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A Colorado woman sprung into action after she looked out her window and saw three kids fall into an icy pond near her home. Dusti Talavera, 23, said she did not hesitate to put on her shoes and rush to the pond, which is 15 feet deep. “Before I realized it, I was on the pond pulling the two kids out, and that’s when I fell in the pond for the third kid,
The three children, who were 4, 6, and 11, were playing on the frozen pond at about 3:30 p.m. when the ice gave way. After pulling two of the children out of the water, Talavera fell through the ice while helping the last one, a 6-year-old girl named Zakiyah Williams. Luckily, the girl’s teenage cousin came out and threw Talavera a rope and helped pull them both to safety.
When deputies from the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office arrived, the 6-year-old was not breathing. They took off her wet coat and performed CPR until paramedics arrived. The girl was taken to the hospital for treatment and released home to her family two days later. South Metro Fire Engineer Corey Sutton said the incident was like a perfect storm. ‘I have four boys. What she did was amazing. I hope if something like that happened to one of my boys, someone like her would be close by,” Sutton said.
Dusti and Zakiyah reunited after her recovery so her parents could thank the bystander that saved their little girl. Zakiyah’s parents, Tashaira and Walter Williams, expressed their gratitude toward Talavera. “They saved my baby and I just really want to thank them for saving her,” Tashaira Williams said. “It was like a puzzle,” Walter Williams added. “Every piece had to go together for it to work and the puzzle got put together so fast it saved my daughter’s life.”
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A former college roommate is donating liver to his friend he hadn’t seen in 21 years. Steven Robinson, 57, was on a family road trip to Detroit when he realized his old friend, Richard Koonce, lived in Ohio. Robinson called Koonce as they were passing through. Koonce, 62, invited Robinson and his family over for an unplanned visit. When the family arrived, Robinson was taken back by Koonce’s considerable weight loss.
Koonce has been battling a rare liver disease called primary sclerosing cholangitis, or PSC, since 2019. PSC is a potentially life-threatening, incurable, and rare, yet chronic liver disease that the American Liver Foundation says causes scarring in a person’s bile ducts, leading to infections, tumors, and severe liver failure.
Koonce had tried various treatment options with little success, and was seeking a living donor for a liver transplant. Since the liver is the only organ in the human body that can grow cells and regenerate itself, donors can give part of their liver to people who need them and regrow their own. Robinson did not hesitate, offering to donate a piece of his liver to save his friend. Robinson was a match with the same blood type.
The chance encounter between the pair of former HBCU college roommates last summer set the stage for the life-saving operation that was performed on Valentine’s Day at a Cleveland hospital. Robinson will be in recovery for six to eight weeks and Koonce’s recovery will take about six months. Robinson said “I think it was a spiritual thing, I always had love for the brother and I could see something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes.”
The unlikely story highlights the dire need for more Black organ donors in the United States, where Black people make up the largest share of minorities in need of organ transplants, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health report. Nearly 84% of organs received from Black people in 2020 were from donors who had died, according to study, but only about 16% of Black organ donations that year came from living donors.
Prior to his college roommate’s decision, Koonce had only shared news of his condition with a small group of friends. “I couldn’t ask any of them to do this,” he said. “But if it’s something you want to do, I can give you the information. That was my position. “I am so truly grateful for the gift of life that God has offered through my friend, Steve Robinson, who decided almost within the very minute that he learned of my disease to step up and do whatever he could to help me,” Koonce said.
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An 80-year-old Canadian man’s good deed is getting praise after he rescued three cars of people trapped in a blizzard. Shannon St. Onge said she thought she could get home from work before the storm hit Pense, a town in Saskatchewan, Canada. She took a dirt road because she thought it would be better for the winter driving conditions but found herself driving with her head out the driver’s window as visibility worsened quickly.
She pulled over and called 911. The operator suggested she wait the storm out but the blizzard that was not projected to let up until dawn. The operators were inundated with calls that night and St.Onge said she started to panic when she called back and the call would not go through. A friend suggested she drop a pin on Google Maps, which she shared to a Pense community page on Facebook.
A stranger saw the post and recognized a farm near where Shannon was stuck. “He private messaged me and said, ‘I know that family. Send me your phone number and I’ll contact their son.” That’s when Andre Bouvier Sr., a farmer who lived about half a mile away from where she pulled over, got a call about St. Onge’s plea for help. He didn’t hesitate before throwing on his bright yellow jacket and snow boots.
His tractor would not start so he decided to head out on foot with a flashlight and walked through a blizzard. To his surprise, he found two other vehicles with people who also needed help stranded alongside St. Onge. He led all seven stranded people back to his home where his 70 year old wife greeted the strangers with a hot pot of coffee, homemade applesauce and a warm place to sleep for the evening.
St.Onge said “This family took seven of us stranded passengers off the road, fed us, laughed with us, bonded with us, gave us blankets, pillows and a warm place to rest our eyes for a few hours. When we all woke up at 5am, he had already plowed the driveway for us and at around 5:30, we made a little convoy and headed to town. Visibility was better, but still very, very poor. In the end, we all made it home safely and I have never hugged my kids tighter.”
Bouvier said the storm was the worst he’d ever seen; he could barely see in front of him, even with a flashlight but graciously said he didn’t want much credit for his efforts “Everybody would have done the same thing. You don’t think about it, you just do it” he said.
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