This week Awesome Stories brings you clean cities, uplifting photos, home grown forests, help for the homeless and healing with forgiveness.

Calgary Leads the Way

Calgary is becoming one of the leading edge cities for clean energy. They’ve not only built one of the first LRT that runs on wind energy, but planned their community around clean energy and public transportation. A huge factor in Calgary becoming a model city is being transit-oriented so that development is built around access to public transit. This encourages both higher utilization of the transit systems and great neighborhoods that people want to live in for walkability, access and transit options. Their LRT (light rail train) system has one of the highest use rates in Canada and the world. And the LRT is powered by wind energy, making it sustainable and affordable. Other city operations run on a mix of wind, solar, hydro and biomass.

Photos to Warm Your Heart

These photos are great reminders to live, love, laugh and spread kindness. Here is a fun collection of 19 uplifting photos from the Kindness Blog to warm your heart. They are all great, but this one lights up my heart. The sheer delight and fascination on this baby’s face tickles my fancy!  May we all remember the joys of life and discovery.

Helping the Homeless

Allan Barsema is a man on fire to help the homeless. He bought a vacant building to start a construction business called the Carpenter’s Place. Shortly after he moved in, the cafe in the building closed leaving the homeless with no place to go. Remembering what it was like when he was homeless, Allan created a place in the building for people to gather, eat and talk. He found his passion, closed the construction business and devoted all this energy toward creating an all-inclusive social services center. The star of this hub is software called MPOWR that connects all the local resources so people can find what help they need. Now, the Carpenter’s Place is a complex web of services to help the homeless and community that is used by over 1200 social workers to help 250,000 people.

Home Grown Forests

Shubhendu Sharma was inspired to plant diverse forests as a counter balance to all the destruction from modern industry. He first met, and later interned, with Japanese forest expert Akira Miyawaki to learn how to grow diverse forests that grow 10 times faster than a typical forest. What’s interesting is how he used his engineering skills to create a process that makes it easy to create a diverse, healthy forest almost anywhere. Ultimately, Shubhendu developed his own process and company to help people plant diverse forests at their work, home or school. His goal is to encourage people to plant more mini-forests that improve air quality, wildlife diversity and food for critters and people too.

Healing from Ferguson

In this article, Desmond Tutu and his daughter offer their wisdom on healing racial tensions from Ferguson. Having transitioned from Apartheid relatively peacefully, they learned about healing and forgiveness. At the core is an African term called Ubuntu reminding us we can’t live without others and must learn that what we do impacts others. With forgiveness and understanding, we can turn our hurts into compassion. Some kind of reconciliation process is needed to guide the healing. They use sharing stories, listening, understanding, apologies, forgiveness and healing to bring people together. We really seem to need a more compassionate view on our race relations in the US.

I can always use reminders about compassion and forgiveness. May we learn to live in peace as one family.