A Tale of Two Fathers (Reader's Digest, November 2010)

Major Kevin Berger felt every muscle tense, poised for the onslaught of wounded bodies that would soon pour through the ER doors. The loudspeaker announcement just minutes earlier had barked the dreaded command: All available personnel are needed at the Airforce Theater Hospital. Stat! A car bomb had exploded in a nearby village.

     The 48-year-old civil engineer had frequently volunteered as a medical technician at the hospital during the past ten months in Iraq. But as the ER filled with the wails of wounded civilians, he thought how some things you never really get used to. His stomach churned at the sight of his first patient: a small boy on a stretcher, big brown eyes dazed and in shock, covered head to foot in blood and dust...Contact me for entire article

Rosie’s Garage (Oprah.com)

Almost 16 years ago, when Rose Espinoza and her husband, Eliasar, moved with their 8-year-old son to La Habra, California, a small town east of Los Angeles, the neighborhood was in trouble. "Boys with baseball bats hung out on the corners—and they weren't looking for a pickup game," says 54-year-old Rosie, a recently retired designer at a biomedical firm. "After threats of a drive-by shooting on our street, I thought, What have we gotten our family into?"...Read entire article

The Night Everything Changed (Woman's Day, February 2009)

As told to Jennifer Haupt

When I thought of homeless people, lost souls with nowhere to go used to come to mind. Now, the face of my own children is what I see. That’s how close our family came to losing everything.

     Back in 2001, life was tough as a 29-year-old single mom. It had taken me two years after my divorce to work my way up from a receptionist to operations manager at an employment agency. Finally, I could afford to rent a real home: half of a duplex with a backyard for my two kids to play in. I was proud of the life I’d built for Tyler and Megan, and the example I provided of being a strong, independent woman. Five seconds was all it took to destroy everything I’d worked so hard to build. It would take me five years to pull myself and my family back from the brink of disaster...Read entire article

A Network of Mothers Mentoring Mothers (Huffington Post, Razoo.com)

In 2003, Robin Smalley was a 51-year-old TV producer in Los Angeles who longed to do something more. She found her inspiration while visiting Dr. Mitch Bessler, an American OB/GYN living in Cape Town, South Africa, who was trying to launch a first-of-kind peer education program for pregnant women living with HIV/AIDS...

     “Both my mother and best friend, Mitch’s sister, had recently died and I was stuck in my losses,” says Smalley, who decided Cape Town would be a good place to stand back and re-evaluate her life for a few weeks. “Meeting the women Mitch was working with—single moms who came from cardboard shacks with no plumbing or electricity—gave me a new perspective. In the morning they sing a prayer, thanking God for what they have. It made me think about all I had to give.”...Contact me for entire article  

Teacher Power (AARP: The Magazine online)

At age 13, Fred Mednick gave an impassioned bar mitzvah speech about how he would change the world by improving education around the globe. Thirty-four years later, after a 20-year career as a high school principal in Los Angeles and Seattle, Mednick is making good on that promise. As founder of Teachers Without Borders (TWB), he has created an ever-expanding, mostly volunteer network of more than 5,000 teachers in 84 countries who are helping one another build dynamic education systems in the communities that need them most...Read entire article

Pillow Talk (O, The Oprah Magazine, June 2008)

Haba Na Haba (“little by little” in Swahili) started in 2001 when Beth Peterson, a marketing consultant based outside of Chicago, visited Tanzania to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. There she met Habitat coordinator Grace Ndunguru Misndai, who was teaching Tanzanian teens orphaned by the AIDS pandemic how to make batik fabric to sell at local bazaars...Read entire article

Pet Detective (Good Housekeeping, June 2005)

She looked like a bird-watcher, standing on the quiet suburban street with her digital camera pointed upward at an oak tree. But what appeared in this woman's viewfinder would've shocked the Audubon Society. Thanks to the camera's telephoto lens, the bird-watcher (actually, a private detective) was peering into the second-floor bedroom window of an old duplex home. And there she snapped the shot she needed to make her case: a man and woman entangled in a compromising position. But Melody Pugh, 49, hadn't been hired by a betrayed wife; she was doing her sleuthing on behalf of a distraught dog owner...Read entire article

The Boy America Saved (Ladies’ Home Journal October 2004)
In December 2003, Christina Frank read a newspaper article about the thousands of Iraqi children who have lost limbs in the war and are unable to receive proper medical attention in their own country. She wanted to do something to help, but thought, “What can one person do?” Her seven-year-old daughter, Lauren, was quick to open her heart and give her the answer. When Frank told her daughter about a 13-year-old boy, Ali, who had lost his arm in an explosion in Basra, Lauren sprang into action. She looked up at mother with excitement and said, “Let’s bring Ali here for help."...Contact me for entire article