JD Turner is a writer and puppy parent based in Los Angeles.
PFLAG’s History of Moms Supporting Their LGBTQ+ Kids
It was 50 years ago, in April of 1972, that Jeanne Manford experienced a night that would change her life — and those of millions of other LGBTQ...
The Power of Interracial Couples, Loving Day, and Pride Month
Fifty-six years ago, the Supreme Court struck down laws in 16 states that made mixed-race marriages illegal. The June 12, 1967 decision in Loving v...
Brittany Has Down Syndrome. And She’s an Entrepreneur, Too.
Each year, about 6,000 babies are born in the United States with Down syndrome. That’s about one in 700 births. The first thing parents often hea...
After Visiting 47 Countries, She's on a Mission of Social Change
Ever since she was a young girl living in South Florida, Loren Medina has loved to travel and learn about countries and cultures different from her...
Challenging the Church's Approach to Mental Health
After her husband died by suicide two years ago, Jessica Jiggetts was at a loss. The days felt never-ending. She ignored invitations to see friends...
How Jeans Became an International Symbol in the Fight Against Sexual Violence
More than 20 years ago, the Italian Supreme Court made international news when it overturned a rape conviction by saying that the “tight jeans”...
Inspire Your Kids With This Urdu Children's Book
As someone who was born in Pakistan and raised in the U.S. since she was 2, being bilingual came naturally to Benish Shah. Outside, in school, and...
Connecting Women Back to the Earth Through Permaculture
Of the 300 million people in the U.S., close to four in five live in urban areas. But when it comes to the plants and animals that feed and clothe...
How One Woman Took a Taboo Topic - Death - and Made it OK to Talk About It
Every month, Gail Rubin pulls up to her computer’s webcam, launches a Zoom conference and takes a dozen or two guests on a journey into a deeply...
Connecting with Mindfulness and Nature through Forest Therapy
Nature is healing. It’s a phrase and concept that has been known for ages. For Kim Ruffin, an associate professor at Roosevelt University, the...
Nashville Nonprofit is Teaching Teens To Write Music, Sing, and Soar
Some of the biggest stars in music are women. But look deeper and a reality comes into focus: women are far underrepresented across nearly every le...
Passover and Beyond: Women Rabbis Are Saving Mother Earth
When Rabbi Ellen Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah: Keepers of the Earth, in 1988, it was pioneering as the first national Jewish environmental orga...
Honoring Military Spouses: Jobs, Training, Camaraderie, and More
When Sue Hoppin first began dating the man who would become her husband, she was a student at University of Denver and he was enrolled at the Air F...
She Quit Her Job For Wine — And Loves It
What do you do when you realize your career has been great, but the job is no longer the right one? For Amanda McKenna, the answer was to quit, rel...
Caring for Every Living Thing on This Planet
Growing up as the daughter of parents who were missionaries and a father who was a science teacher, Katharine Hayhoe never saw any opposition betwe...
Beating Cancer, Saving Lives, & Founding Brigade of Mercy
Ambreen Rizvi had lived a full life. She had a successful career in risk management for major financial services companies. She was a mother of thr...
Meet the 21st-Century ‘Cat Lady’
Valisha Jackson never considered herself a big pet person. She had one cat growing up named Puddy, and while she loved animals, she had no plans to...
Telling Indigenous Stories to a New — and Global — Audience
It was 22 years ago that Carlotta Cardana and Danielle SeeWalker met in Fremont, Nebraska. Both were high schoolers, with Cardana living in the U.S. as an excha
Designing Ready-To-Wear Fashion For Bicultural Identities
What does it mean to “fit in”? For Nyla Hasan, that’s always been a complicated question. Her mother is of French Canadian and European desce...
Tackling Racism from Within
It was a surreal moment that caused a national uproar and made news around the world. On April 16, 2018, police arrested two Black men at a Starbuc...
Meet the Dog Parent of the Century
Madhumita Chatterjee was just a year out of business school when her world came tumbling down. In a single day, she went from being a well-paid and...
What Are Holidays for Spiritually Blended, Interfaith Families?
When she was growing up in Milwaukee, Yael Blatt’s family held fast to Orthodox Jewish traditions. They kept kosher in the home, followed the rul...
Asian-Americans Are a Minority in Hollywood. Here's How One Woman is Changing That.
It took nearly two decades of Tina Huang’s life before she saw someone who looked like her on TV. It was the late 1990s. Margaret Cho was making...
This Charity is Teaching Young Girls About Managing Money for Success
When it comes to money, it’s well-known that women by and large make less than men for the same work. There’s even an annual Equal Pay Day in M...
What It Means to Be a Woman in Progress
It was five years ago that Linda Lopez decided she had to make a change. It was her 35th birthday and she had worked as a high-level executive assi...
Inspiring Teenage Girls, One Photo at a Time
What stories can a simple photo tell? What difference can a camera make? They’re questions at the heart of Las Fotos Project, a unique nonprofit...
Meet The Afghan Artist Who Wants To Help Creators Free Themselves From The Taliban
Watching the images this summer of Afghans desperate to flee their country as U.S. troops left and the Taliban took over, Gazelle Samizay could rel...
This Storyteller Is Subverting What We Know About Theater
Who gets to tell — and own — their stories? It’s a question that’s long been at the heart of the artistic works of Raquel...
Helping Young Latinx Writers Find Their Voice
Today, Colombia is one of the most popular tourist destinations for Americans, with its beaches, cuisine, and festivals drawing adventurers and foo...
This "Black Fairy Godmother" Is Gifting Serious Cash to Women in Need on Social Media
When Simone Gordon suddenly lost her banking job four years ago, the mother of a newborn struggled to keep up with the bills. Her mind raced daily...
How a Baseball Fan Took Her Love of the Dodgers to Start a Movement Around Women and Sports
Growing up in Los Angeles, Danielle Wong remembers always being tuned in to a Dodgers game at her home. It either played on TV or on the radio with...
How Anglers and Conservationists Are Pushing to Include More Women in the Picture
When she gave birth to her daughter 22 years ago, Jen Davis never imagined her life — and diet — would look the way it does today. As a 20-yea...
Connecting Women Over Motherhood and a Love for Running
Whitney Heins was 6 when she began running marathons. Sort of. Her father, an avid runner, would train each year for the Marine Corps Marathon in W...
How Taking a Break from Social Media and Posting Online Helped a Mormon Grandmother-to-be Reconnect
It was in early June that Jana Riess, a journalist, author and book editor, posted her column with the headline announcing that she’d be taking a...
How 'The Farm Chicks' Helped Create a Culture Around Upcycling and Vintage Wares
It started 19 years ago as a small charity fundraiser in a friend’s barn on the eastern Washington prairie when Serena Thompson gathered friends...
How Churches Are Joining the Sustainability Movement
Nearly seven years ago, Martha Blume and Marj Chapman got on a bus with a few members of their church and headed to Manhattan for the People's Clim...
How Women of Faith Are Leading the Way in the Vaccine Push
Hundreds of thousands were dying as a seemingly unstoppable virus spread across the continent. A technological feat of a breakthrough was made with...
A Church Recovers After a Tumultuous Year of COVID-19
For a long time, Valencia Jenkins-Mann wasn’t sure if she wanted to get the shot. It wasn’t that Mann didn’t believe COVID-19 was real. She...
Women Conservationists Grow Their Footprint in the Mountain West
Growing up in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, Becca Aceto was taught from a young age to love the outdoors. Childhood was full of backpacking, campin...
Asian American Women Leading the Fight to #StopAAPIHate
At the time, it was a shocking, unusual event at a middle school in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles.
'Ms. Finch's List': How One Tennessee Woman Vaccinated Hundreds
They call it “Ms. Finch’s list.” From her home in Knoxville, Tennessee, former hospice healthcare professional Cynthia Finch has spent the la...
Defying Her Culture, She Launches Mental Health Business
Growing up, Sahaj Kohli faced many challenges similar to other children of immigrants: reconciling the culture of her Indian parents with her own a...
Reclaiming Oakland: The Ohlone Are Rematriating the Land
Thousands of years ago, the Ohlone people inhabited a vast swath of California, stretching from the San Francisco Bay to the Salinas Valley, living...
From Book Club to Pandemic Superheroes
Across the country, countless cities and states are running into the same hurdles during the coronavirus pandemic: getting COVID shots into arms. V...
Answering the Call in Koreatown, FACE to Face
As the daughter of Korean immigrants who worked as ministers in Southern California, Hyepin Im got an up-close view at the challenges faced by the...
This Program Helps You Give Friendly Calls to Lonely Seniors
For many Americans, there are a few words that sum up 2020: stress, fear, anxiety, and loneliness. The obvious culprit for all of the above is the...
This Somali American Woman Is Taking Care of Herself — and Others
When she emigrated from Mogadishu to San Diego as an asylee 21 years ago, Fartun Weli had a simple list of goals: enroll in school, learn English,...
Let There Be (Solar-Powered) Light
For 30 years, Ark Refuge Ministries has worked to help restore the lives of those recovering from drug addiction, as well as people who have strugg...
Helping the Homeless Feel Like They Belong
Marla Bautista had already suffered the loss of her father and mother when an abusive stepfather kicked her out at age 18. With nothing but a teddy...
Trees of Life: Faith-Based Planting in Maryland
At the Guru Gobind Singh Foundation, an 800-member Sikh temple in Rockville, Maryland, big changes have been afoot — all in the name of helping t...
Leveling the Outdoor Playing Field
Growing up in Boston, Chaya Harris saw the outdoors as part of her everyday life. She’d play in the streets until the sun went down and, when her...
This Woman Turned from Mourning to Mindfulness
The turning point for Linda Villines came four years ago. Living in Los Angeles, she was working as a personal assistant while pursuing gigs as a...
Revolutionizing Eldercare in Mississippi
There’s a unique experiment in housing in Tupelo, Mississippi, that is reimagining what life can be like for elderly Americans. Ten single-story...
Helping Kenosha Rise Again, Through Art
The images made headlines across the world. A Black man shot seven times in the back in front of his children. Police put on leave amid a state in...
Montana Moms Rescuing Refugees
It started with a photo of a young boy that shook the globe. It was just over five years ago that the picture of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syria...
South Asian Women's Sanctuary in South Florida
Every year, millions of women experience emotional and physical abuse at the hands of intimate partners. Over the years, resources and legal protec...
Religious Bridge Building in the Heartland
When you think of Omaha, Nebraska, you might imagine its bitter winters, top-notch steaks, and famous hometown billionaire, Warren Buffett. But wha...
Farmers Preach Climate Change Gospel in the Heartland
Increasing ocean temperatures. Melting glaciers. Disappearing wildlife. Fires and hurricanes that become bigger, more frequent, and increasingly de...
Sisters Saving Mother Earth
It was five years ago that Pope Francis released Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home, a monumental 225-page encyclical that called on humans t...
Homebound Shoppers Receive Heavenly Help
As the coronavirus pandemic sent states into shutdowns earlier this year, Jayde Powell sprung into action. Powell, a senior at the University of N...
The Gift Economy Offers Free Stuff — No Strings Attached
Jennifer Crow’s Seattle-area home features the same name-brand appliances, furniture, lighting, and accouterments that you’d see in other homes...
Sew There: Southern Churches Aid Front-Line Workers
As the coronavirus pandemic struck the nation over the winter and spring, Americans scrambled: Grocery store shelves were emptied of toilet paper...
Minnesota Mother of Adopted Black Sons Protests Floyd Death
It was a cloudy afternoon on the last day of May in Ottertail, Minn., when Marcy Ugstad decided that she had to do something. Across the nation, pr...
Living Just 186 Days, His Mom Made Memories Last a Lifetime
When Ellen Tomczyk and her husband’s son Cole was born on June 14, 1999, they thought Cole would be around for the rest of their lives. Instead,...
