1 . When 76-year-old Antoinette-Marie Williams played 17-year-old Emmett Daniels in chess for the first time, she gave Daniels a run for his money. Paired through DOROT, a New York organization which was launched in 1976, they are a perfect match. “I was a good opponent for him. I don’t think he expected it.” Williams told the CVS Health blog Fortune Well. Their weekly games have led Daniels and Williams to a cross-generational relationship that they both enjoy. Williams and Daniels’ relationship disproves the idea that people of different generations have little in common.

Since its founding, DOROT has achieved a reputation of excellence and innovation in the fields of aging services. Volunteers of young ages offer critical resources to older adults, in services specific to the person’s needs and interests, with the ultimate goal of lessening loneliness of the old.

Loneliness has been recognized as a significant social issue for many years, but the classification of loneliness as an epidemic(流行病) has emerged only in recent years. In 2018, the UK government appointed a Minister for Loneliness, highlighting the increasing concern around the issue. This followed the publication of the 2017 report by the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission, which found that loneliness was a growing social epidemic and called for a national strategy to address the issue.

Fortunately, there are ways to battle loneliness, including the intervention in the lives of isolated seniors by organizations like DOROT. It advocates building a support network by reaching out to family and friends, joining a community or social group, or volunteering to connect with like-minded people. The connection between Williams and Daniels shows that these inter-generational relationships play an important role in reducing loneliness and adding joy to the lives of all the participants, young and old.

Another way to battle loneliness is to use technology to stay connected with loved ones which fosters meaning and purpose through online activities and conversations. Practicing self-care is also encouraged, as is being patient because strong relationships take time and effort to create.

2 . Crossing Phoenix, Arizona, are 180 miles of canals. In 1867, the city’s founding father, Jack Swilling saw the remains of irrigation (灌溉) channels wandering across the landscape. He realized that, centuries before, some society had farmed this desert. Soon after, Swilling began clearing the blocked canals to bring agriculture back to the region.

Three years later, Swilling and other pioneers met to consider names for their settlement. The top two were Pumpkinville and Stonewall. Luckily, English adventurer Darrell Duppa proposed a name inspired by the resurrection (复兴) of the canals. “A great race once lived here and another great race will live here in the future,” he considered. “I predict that a new city will spring, phoenix-like, from the ruins and ashes of the old.”

Gary Huckleberry, a researcher, said, “In the southwest, we have some serious issues to deal with in terms of water. The Colorado River is the main source of water for the southwest and it’s over distributed. We’ve got population growth and climate change. How are we going to deal with that? I think there’s something to be learned by looking at past societies who managed water for thousands of years.”

That great society was the Hohokam. Between 100 and 1450 AD, they constructed 1,000 miles of canals. As the Hohokam expanded their network, they constantly repaired, cleaned and diverted the canals. “It requires cooperation, because all the users of the water from that canal have to agree not only to construct it, but also to maintain it,” Henderson, a scientist, said. “Users would have to agree to certain conditions to keep the entire system going.” The Hohokam committed to sharing water and put themselves on timetables.

The Hohokam used canal irrigation for 3,000 years. “That, to me, is the definition of sustainable development,” Huckleberry said. “They learned how to sustainably farm, to manage water, to not destroy their soils in a way that is worthy and might give us insight into how we might deal with the current trouble. I think one of the key lessons is that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

3 . As the world has changed,so has education. Since 2018, Nelly Cheboi and her non-profit TechLit Africa have been bringing computer technology into schools in Kenya, helping students join the digital world, and unlock their potential. With its own software programs, curriculum (课程) and teacher training programs, this non-profit hopes to change Africa.

In 2012, Cheboi received a scholarship to College in Illinois that changed her life. She grew up in poverty in rural Kenya, watching her mother struggle to support her family alone. Cheboi had no experience with computers before moving to the US to study. She hand wrote papers and then struggled to type them out on a laptop computer. Somehow she fell in love with computer science and began a career in the field.But she did not lose sight of her origins. “As an undergraduate, I invested all of my income from various campus jobs into my community back in Kenya,” she said on the TechLit Africa website. But soon she wanted to do more for it and that is how TechLit Africa began.

Cheboi recalled how her background helped her understand how important technological knowledge could be for children living in poverty. She built a school with the idea of bringing computer science as part of kids’ curriculum growing up. But she found that it was going to be really hard to impact as many people as possible, because it was so hard to fund raise. Then in order to reach more students,she introduced computer training to existing schools. Cheboi physically dragged over 40 recycled computers that had been donated to them by various tech companies to Kenya in suitcases.

Now, since the non-profit has grown, it works with various companies that help them clean the donated computers of data and send them to Africa. TechLit Africa runs its own curriculum with its own software programs in 10 Kenyan schools,and the hope is to increase to 100 throughout Africa by next year. The students love learning about computers,and in turn are gaining skills that will help them make use of their talents into a way out of poverty.

4 . The majority of Britons are educated in state schools, making up around 60% of those admitted to Oxford and Cambridge in 2013. Admissions at other leading universities were also weighted towards teenagers educated privately.

Then began a quiet revolution. The number of state-schooled pupils getting Oxbridge places has risen yearly; the number from private schools has fallen. The Russell Group of 24 leading universities says its members aim to admit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

A few things lie behind this change. The government has given cash to universities to reach underrepresented students and, since 2018, required them to publish plans showing how they are doing this. One report in 2018 showed that eight schools, six of which were private, accounted for more Oxbridge places than 2,900 other secondary schools combined.

Teach First, a scheme that sends clever graduates into tough schools for a couple of years, has also helped raise pupils, eagerness. It began in London, where the highest- performing state schools are concentrated.

All this has fueled a joint effort by schools and universities to make pupils consider the distinguished universities. For those state-school kids getting into top universities, extra help is needed. “You need to provide extra tutoring in the first year,” says Professor Smith from Oxford, who made efforts to admit state-school students before it became fashionable. She says they often do worse in exams at the end of the first year, but clean up in final exams.

That would seem to rebut one of the criticisms made of universities’ efforts to correct the state-private imbalance: that letting in more state-school students means standards will slip. “If you bring in people with diverse experiences and ways of thinking, who challenge one another’s assumptions, it promotes intellectual creativity and academic success,” says Helen, the principal of Mansfield College, Oxford.

“All this adds up to an important change,” says Lawrence. “Increasing numbers of state-school children are applying to universities in America and getting full scholarships.”

7 . On Mondays, two of my children get ready for school in an unusual way. Each packs plenty of food and water, a pair of rubber boots and sometimes a cup of hot chocolate. Then, I drop them off at a nearby park where they spend the entire day outside at a certified forest school.

When I first signed them up for forest school program, I loved the idea, but as a mum, I was concerned about a few things: Would they be comfortable outside for that long? Would they stay engaged for that many hours? Then I asked them if time ever seemed to move slowly, they stared at me in confusion. They didn’t understand my question, which fittingly removed it.

In this program, kids direct their own play, climbing tall trees or testing ice on the frozen lake. They are never told their play is too high or too sharp, but are rather trusted to self- adjust. Something else my sons appreciate about forest school is not being told to move on to the next activity, but being left to stay in a particular spot for as long as their curiosity allows. :

“What about all the things they’re missing in real school?” concerned parents have asked me. Neither of their classroom teachers thinks it’s a problem, but most significantly, my kids are learning new and different skills that a classroom cannot teach. They are learning to sit silently and observe nature up close-a skill that’s virtually impossible to develop in a noisy and overcrowded classroom setting. They are making social connections across a broader range of age groups. They cooperate together, using their different sizes and strengths to fulfill various roles within their games.

I appreciate it that forest school is shaping my boys’ relationship with the outdoors. They’re learning how to spend extended periods of time in nature, what to do to pass the time, and developing knowledge that will get them much closer to nature in the coming decades.

10 . Everyone knows what makes a good story. Our hero starts their journey as a flawed being. In scene after scene, they face challenges that push them down new paths. By the end of the talc, they overcome setbacks and become a better person in the process.

We love these plots in the novels we read but the principles of a good story offer much more than entertainment. Recent research shows that the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives can powerfully help us recover from stress. People who generate tales of struggling and turning over a new leaf from their own lives appear to have much better mental health. Professor Dan McAdams put forward this idea and discovered that whether someone can describe having had some control over events in their past is an important predictor of mental health. Another key theme involved is finding some kind of positive meaning after stressful events.

McAdams invited 14 and 15-year-olds to join in an experiment to write about their experiences of failure and success. Half of them were then given extra instructions to describe the ways they had made their success a reality and how the failure had changed them for the better. Eight weeks later, members of this group reported greater persistence and better grades in their schoolwork.

Exciting as these results are, some experts sound a few notes of caution. They worry that, hearing about the power of self-narratives, many people may feel they have to find a positive turning point in life. If they can’t, they could end up feeling guilty about having somehow “failed”.

Clearly, self-narratives aren’t the panacea. Nevertheless, if you hope for self-improvement, you can use the findings to good effect. By recognizing ourselves as the hero at the center of our own struggles, we can all become the author of our own destiny and change ourselves for the better.