Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Principal Refuses to Abandon Homeless Student, Despite It Costing His Job

When Rob Burnside learned that a homeless student named Landerius Hayes was sleeping in his car but could no longer legally attend his school due to a change of address, he went home that day and told his wife about the situation. The first words out of her mouth were, “Well, he can stay with us, if he needs to.” Together, they opened their home, eventually became Hayes’ legal guardians, and watched him walk across a graduation stage this past May. The decision cost Burnside his 31-year career in education — a price he accepted without hesitation: “What value can we put on the life of a young person?” What this story quietly reveals is that the most consequential choices people make are rarely complicated — they just require a willingness to let someone else matter more than personal cost. Hayes is now studying to become an aviation mechanic, and in the stands at his graduation sat the man he calls Pops, who gave up his job so a teenager could keep his future.

Be The Change

Think of someone in your life — perhaps a student, a neighbor, an elder, or a young person who may be quietly struggling — and ask yourself honestly: have you been “processing the paperwork” when you could be asking a deeper question? Today, reach out to that person and simply offer your presence and humanity.

Read the Signals and Stay Open

At fourteen, Shmuel Klein — a scholarly boy who knew nothing of war — was handed a prison full of soldiers and told to run it. He couldn’t, so he told them the truth: you run it. I’ll sit up front with my books and look official. And they did. When Passover came, he unlocked every cell, said he’d be gone a week, and asked them simply to keep up appearances. He returned to find every prisoner exactly where he’d left them. This is the story Aryae Coopersmith’s grandfather told him before his bar mitzvah — and it turned out to be less a family history than a lifelong instruction: “Trust the people in the room with you. Open the doors, and see what holds.” Coopersmith spent the next seven decades testing that instruction: sparking friendship between a communist and a Republican through a high school newspaper, co-founding the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco (starting with a Presbyterian seminarian’s $400 savings), building an HR community in Silicon Valley by getting people who never spoke to each other into the same room. The thread running through it all isn’t ideology or ambition — it’s the circle itself. His own children completed the lesson one frantic dinner when his daughter looked up and said, “Dad, you need laughing lessons” — and then she and her brother clowned until he broke.

Be The Change

Identify one person in your life whose worldview genuinely differs from yours, and reach out today — not to debate, but to ask a single open question about how they came to see things the way they do. Listen with open curiosity, and without preparing your response.

Amazon Canopy Bridges Lead to 15K+ Safe Road Crossings

Just hours before installing the first canopy bridges near Alta Floresta, biologist Fernanda Abra found two marmosets dead on the road — a species already threatened with extinction. That grief became the baseline against which everything that followed would be measured. Eight rope bridges later, camera traps documented 15,000 safe wildlife crossings over 15 months, with not a single roadkill recorded. The bridges are elegantly low-tech: multilayered rope structures designed for primates that swing, primates that walk, and primates that use their tails — each species finding its own way across. Tufted capuchins took seven months before trusting the first bridge, a reminder, as Abra puts it, that “our sense of urgency in conservation doesn’t take into account the timing of the impact.” The stakes reach far beyond individual animals: when primates disappear, seed dispersal collapses, forests thin, and a whole web of interdependence quietly unravels. Brazil’s federal transport department has now designated Abra’s design as the national standard for highways — a rare moment when a solution born from sorrow beside a roadside becomes official policy.

Be The Change

Find one road, trail, or path near you where wildlife might cross — a creek corridor, a woodlot edge, a highway overpass — and spend five minutes simply observing what moves there. Then, look up whether your city or region has a wildlife corridor or safe-passage initiative, and consider signing up for a single volunteer monitoring session.

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My Shift From Sales to a Farm Sanctuary with 150 Animals

Andreas Nussbaumer, with credit to his wife, recounts being lured away from a successful business career and the empty feeling that came with it “into just being, surrounded by the vegetables and the animals.” They steward a sanctuary for rescued farm animals in Weppersdorf, Austria. Animals “show you, every single moment, whether you are actually present. The horses will tell you the truth about yourself that you were too busy to hear.” At one point, snails arrived by multitudes. They let them be instead of poisoning them. They found that snails left healthy plants alone, and only feasted on the ones left to die from attacks by other animals. They learned to focus on plant health – not the snails. While their hearts break amid the multitude of issues facing the world, the animals and plants taught Andreas to be present, and focus on staying physically and emotionally healthy. “I can be fully present here at the sanctuary, pet the animals, laugh, feel grateful, and put my energy into the things I can actually influence.”

Be The Change

Devote a few moments to pay attention and be present to one little organism in your ecosystem. Be open to learn what your body already knows.

This Month’s DailyGood Digest

In the gentle unfolding of this month’s stories, we found reflections on the power of community, memory, and the human spirit.

In a poignant reflection on loss, a father’s grief becomes a rainbow, offering a glimpse of hope amid sorrow. We remember Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who passed away this month, through her insights on generous listening, showing how true healing can occur through a depth of genuine presence. In a digital age of distraction, Randima Fernando challenges us to rethink the attention economy in his discussion on mindfulness and metrics. Ruth Brigandi’s story of rediscovering memory after illness offers a testament to resilience and the power of consciousness. Sr. Elizabeth Greim’s journey through divorce and four earrings in each ear to dedicating her life in service to those at society’s margins reveals how doors that look closed can open in the presence of a sincere heart. Courtney Martin’s exploration of the intention to solve other people’s problems invites us to look deeper into the nuances of altruism. In Saskatoon, Canada, young and old learn together, bridging generations and enriching lives. Rama Mani and Alexander Schieffer remind us that the earth creates family without borders, as their journey with a small earth sphere touches countless lives. Leena Wilde Ryan’s tale of finding her voice resonates deeply through its shining authenticity. Finally, in a quiet moment at a gas station, Erez Levin’s encounter with ancestral wisdom illuminates the night.

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Solar Ambulance Built by 23 Students

In a test center in the Netherlands, a sleek white-and-yellow vehicle glides quietly over concrete — but it was built for something far rougher: the red-dirt roads of rural Kenya, where the nearest clinic can be a day’s journey away. Twenty-three university students, many of whom paused their degrees to see it through, spent a year constructing what may be the world’s first solar-powered ambulance. Named Stella Juva — “stella” for the team’s lineage of solar cars, “juva” from the Latin for “to help” — the vehicle carries tuberculosis testing kits, cooled vaccine storage, ultrasound equipment for pregnant women, and a defibrillator, all powered by roof-mounted solar panels and a battery for cloudy days or night runs. Its range stretches 715 kilometers on a sunny day, and crucially, as one partner noted, “it doesn’t have to go back to a central point — it can go on and on and on.” The design inverts the usual logic of emergency medicine: rather than rushing patients to hospitals, it brings the hospital to patients. The team heads to Kenya next month, spare tires and shovels packed for when the terrain fights back. Twenty-one-year-old project leader Mathijs van Gerven put it plainly: “We are 23 students and we built this within just one year. The technical industry should be able to do this way better and way faster.”

Be The Change

Carve out 15 minutes each day this week to research one issue in the world that tugs at your heartstrings. Often, the first step to addressing a challenge is simply to learn more about it.

Living with Questions

At seventeen, Charles Gibbs was asked to stay after Sunday school class by a well-meaning elder — and left with a message that would redirect the entire arc of his life: we don’t ask questions like that here. Rather than killing his spiritual hunger, that closed door sent him into theater, into poetry, into decades building the United Religions Initiative across six continents — all of it, he now sees, is the same search wearing different clothes. What emerged from an unplanned conversation is a man who has made peace with living inside the questions themselves. He draws on Wordsworth’s poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” — and the image of “an eye made quiet” — to gesture at the contemplative states where questions finally dissolve, not because they’re answered, but because the one asking them temporarily disappears.

Be The Change

Recall one question you were told — explicitly or implicitly — not to ask, in childhood or later. Write it down exactly as you would have asked it then. Sit with it for five minutes without trying to answer it, and notice what it feels like simply to let the question exist.