Earlier this year, a baby stray cat named Zoe showed up at the Palm Springs Animal Shelter, Caldwell’s facility, looking more like a balloon than anything feline, her tiny body swollen to an absurd degree. The poor thing had been suffering from subcutaneous emphysema. Due to some damage to her windpipe, air (and lots of it) was trapped underneath her skin.
Caldwell told Upworthy, “My guess is that she was bitten by another cat, possibly even her mother? I don’t think the trauma was anything malicious … just one of those accidents that happened.”
Regardless of its cause, the medical condition was rare enough in grown cats, let alone kittens. Caldwell told KVUE, “This is the craziest veterinarian case I’ve seen in quite some time.”
The antidote to this bizarre dilemma was surprisingly straightforward. Caldwell carefully “poked” Zoe in various parts of her body with a needle and syringe, slowly releasing the trapped air. With each deflation, she became less balloon and more kitten, appetite and all. After only a week of treatment, she already weighed a healthy two pounds.
“She’s eating like a champ,” Caldwell wrote on Instagram. “She loves to eat, and she’s gaining weight every single day.”
Zoe, affectionately known online as “Puff Kitty,” “Mrs. Puff,” and “Marshmallow,” instantly captured hearts with her unusual and harrowing story. Her videos have not only gone viral, they have been picked up by national outlets like ABC. Suffice it to say, people were invested.
“I’m obsessed with Zoe…My cats think I’m cheating when I talk about her!” one fan wrote.
“I would die for Zoe,” echoed another.
“Protect Zoey at all costs,” added a third.
Zoe’s now-famous face (the puffed-up version, of course) is even featured on a T-shirt with all proceeds going to the Palm Springs Animal Shelter’s “Love Fund,” so other animals can have more access to specialized care. In other words, she is making sure other fur babies can have their own happy ending.
“Zoe, our Puff Kitty warrior — a tiny but mighty kitten — has touched the hearts of so many with her story of resilience,” the shelter wrote in an Instagram and Facebook post.
Of course, all this high praise has apparently “gone to her head,” Caldwell joked. Now she even has a “publicist, an agent, and a stylist!”
As of March 13, Zoe has been recovering well in foster care and is preparing to find her forever home. Caldwell assures that from here on out, “she’ll be normal but will demand copious amounts of love.” But hey, after all that…she deserves it!
While Zoe’s next chapter will likely be far less dramatic than her first, she will certainly have no trouble earning that love, even without the balloon-like condition. That is thanks in no small part to Dr. Caldwell and other professionals like him who fight for an animal’s second chance.
By the way, Caldwell has even more crazy stories found in his book, The Pet Doctor’s Shoes: True Tales from the Trenches of Veterinary Medicine, which you can find here.
A single door can open up a world of endless possibilities. For homeowners, the front door of their house is a gateway to financial stability, job security, and better health. Yet for many, that door remains closed. Due to the rising costs of housing, 1 in 3 people around the world wake up without the security of safe, affordable housing.
Since 1976, Habitat for Humanity has made it their mission to unlock and open the door to opportunity for families everywhere, and their efforts have paid off in a big way. Through their work over the past 50 years, more than 65 million people have gained access to new or improved housing, and the movement continues to gain momentum. Since 2011 alone, Habitat for Humanity has expanded access to affordable housing by a hundredfold.
A world where everyone has access to a decent home is becoming a reality, but there’s still much to do. As they celebrate 50 years of building, Habitat for Humanity is inviting people of all backgrounds and talents to be part of what comes next through Let’s Open the Door, a global campaign that builds on this momentum and encourages people everywhere to help expand access to safe, affordable housing for those who need it most. Here’s how the foundation to a better world starts with housing, and how everyone can pitch in to make it happen.
Volunteers raise a wall for the framework of a new home during the first day of building at Habitat for Humanity’s 2025 Carter Work Project.
Globally, almost 3 billion people, including 1 in 6 U.S. families, struggle with high costs and other challenges related to housing. A crisis in itself, this also creates larger problems that affect families and communities in unexpected ways. People who lack affordable, stable housing are also more likely to experience financial hardship in other areas of their lives, since a larger share of their income often goes toward rent, utilities, and frequent moves. They are also more likely to experience health problems due to chronic stress or environmental factors, such as mold. Housing insecurity also goes hand-in-hand with unstable employment, since people may need to move further from their jobs or switch jobs altogether to offset the cost of housing.
Affordable homeownership creates a stable foundation for families to thrive, reducing stress and increasing the likelihood for good health and stable employment. Habitat for Humanity builds and repairs homes with individual families, but it also strengthens entire communities as well. The MicroBuild® Initiative, for example, strengthens communities by increasing access to loans for low-income families seeking to build or repair their homes. Habitat ReStore locations provide affordable appliances and building materials to local communities, in addition to creating job and volunteer opportunities that support neighborhood growth.
Marsha and her son pose for a photo while building their future home with Southern Crescent Habitat for Humanity in Georgia.
Everyone can play a part in the fight for housing equity and the pursuit of a better world. Over the past 50 years, Habitat for Humanity has become a leader in global housing thanks to an engaged network of volunteers—but you don’t need to be skilled with a hammer to make a meaningful impact. Building an equitable future means calling on a wide range of people and talents.
Here’s how you can get involved in the global housing movement:
Speaking up on social media about the growing housing crisis
Volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build in your local community
Travel and build with Habitat in the U.S. or in one of 60+ countries where we work around the globe
Join the Let’s Open the Door movement and, when you donate, you can create your own personalized door
Every action, big and small, drives a global movement toward a better future. A safe home unlocks opportunity for families and communities alike, but it’s volunteers and other supporters, working together with a shared vision, who can open the door for everyone.
Turning 40 marks a major milestone for many people. It can be an exciting time when your family, career, hobbies, and sense of self are finally falling into place. Unfortunately, it can also be the decade when your joints start hurting and your hair goes gray.
In other words, your 40s can be a mixed bag. What’s especially fascinating is that everyone’s experience in their early 40s will be different. Some people say that’s exactly what makes it such an interesting season of life.
Guy on X notices a few strange things about being in his 40s
Ben Eisenhart, a self-described dad and husband who turned 42 earlier this year, recently took stock of his peers and found that there was a wild amount of variety.
He realized that he’d reached a point in time when minor differences in life choices, luck, and genetics that were barely noticeable in his 20s were becoming massively evident.
Being in your early 40s is weird, man. People around your age are in every stage of life. You have people who are grandparents. You have people who have newborns. You have people dating 25-year-olds. You have people celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. Some of them look…
The post was a hit, racking up nearly two million views and hundreds of comments from people eager to share their own experiences and observations. Here are five things people say make your 40s the weirdest and most interesting decade of your life.
1. Kids
In your early 20s, the vast majority of your peers don’t have kids yet. In your mid-to-late 20s, the process begins, and newborns start crashing group hangouts. Late nights at the bar become lazy afternoons at the brewery as parent friends try to survive the early stages of parenthood. Others either aren’t ready for kids yet or have decided not to have them.
In your 40s, it’s not nearly as simple.
Some folks are still child-free. Others might have grown children who are out of the house. Some are even grandparents by this point. Others are just getting started in parenthood with their first newborn. In fact, the latter is becoming increasingly common, with over 20% of women now having their first child after the age of 35.
I became a granny at 37😐 I also had a 1yr old at this time. It was a strange time lol now early 50s and 6 grandkids and only feel now my life's in order. I was slow to arrive at that destination!
Some people look older, and some look younger. That’s just the genetic lottery, and it’s true at almost any age.
But by your 40s, life choices and health issues have piled up and widened this gap. Some 40-year-olds could pass for being in their 20s, while others look 20 years older.
Genetics alone can account for huge differences in how we age, and it’s a topic of great interest to scientists. But a few decades of staying fit, or smoking, or using or not using sunscreen really start to show up around your early 40s.
3. Couples
Similar diversity shows up not just in whether people are partnered up, but in the many different shapes and timelines of romance that appear.
As Eisenhart notes, many people marry relatively young and remain together well into their 40s and beyond. Others are divorced, on their second or third marriage, or have been single the entire time. Even among those who are single, they may be dipping their toe in the dating pool of folks their own age…or, in some cases, much younger.
It can make for some very interesting get-togethers.
4. Career
There’s a great camaraderie in your 20s when everyone you know is just getting started in their careers. Some are struggling through menial jobs, while others are in more prestigious fields but are grinding their way up from the bottom of the totem pole.
You’re all in it together, in a sense.
In your 40s, those career paths have diverged a great deal over the years. Some folks are executive-level leaders at big companies. Others have been doctors and scientific researchers for over a decade. Some have suffered setbacks or are in the midst of a career change, piecing together work the best they can. More and more people in their 40s are even going back to school.
It can, and should, be a time of deep empathy and leaning on one another.
What makes your 40s interesting is most people spent their 20s/30s building toward this point. There was a plan. A horizon. A rough idea of what life should look like by now. And then you get here… and there are no reference points. Everyone’s running a completely different…
Ultimately, most people in their 40s who commented on the post agreed on one thing: it’s a pretty cool season of life.
“All these are just lessons that we ain’t competing with anyone, at every age in our life just live your best and do things that makes you happy and always love yourself even more,” one X user wrote.
Another said, “Life really doesn’t follow one timeline. People the same age can be in completely different seasons, and that’s normal.”
“I turn 48 in July, and what ive gathered is wherever you find yourself during these years, as long as you find the joy, its all good,” another user added. “Out of all my decades, 40s have been surprisingly my favorite, mainly because ive learned to only worry about what i can control.”
One person noted that your 40s offer an amazing opportunity for transformation: “Early 40s is the last time of a big ‘potential’ horizon. Where you could totally reinvent yourself and make it if you wanted to.”
And finally, many wisely advised that your 40s are nothing to fear:
Life starts at 40, that's where everything is happening
It wasn’t just 40-year-olds who were drawn to the viral post, however. More than a handful of people in their 50s and 60s stopped by with just a few choice words: “Just you wait.”
On June 22, 1973, the Bee Gees, brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, appeared on the TV show TheMidnight Special and, throughout the 90-minute broadcast, showcased their humor, soul, and incredible harmonies. But, by far, the highlight of the night was a performance of their recent hit, “Run to Me,” off their 1972 release, To Whom It May Concern.
The Midnight Special was a late-night music and variety show that ran on NBC for nine years (1972-1981). Along with “Run to Me,” on this episode, the Bee Gees played their 1968 hit “I Gotta Get a Message to You,” sang a duet with Wilson Pickett of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” and performed a medley which included, “Morning of My Life,” “Holiday,” “Let There Be Love,” and “My World.”
The Bee Gees’ incredible ‘Run to Me’ performance
Their performance of “Run to Me” is incredible because with the stripped-down, acoustic-guitar-only arrangement, you can really hear their amazing harmonies—especially when Robin and Maurice hop in on the chorus.
“‘Run to Me’ was one of those songs that all three of us sang. It was never really written for one person. ‘I’ll sing the verses. You sing the chorus because they are much higher,’ Gibb recalled, as if speaking with his brothers. “Robin’s voice was much higher than mine … See, it wasn’t like a group. It was a family. And so, whoever wanted to sing, sang.”
The origins of ‘Run to Me’
“We wrote [Run to Me] at our manager Robert Stigwood’s house in Beverly Hills. He was a great visionary and championed our beliefs and chemistry as brothers. Lyrically, this song chronicles the wishes of a man who longs to be noticed by a broken-hearted girl,” Robin recalled.
Even though the Bee Gees appear at the top of their game in the performance, it was a transitional point for the band. “Run to Me” would be their last significant hit for three years, until they transitioned into a more soulful, disco sound, with their 1975 hit “Jive Talkin’.” This would launch the band into superstardom, peaking with 1977’s Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack which featured three number one singles from the album contributed by the Bee Gees—”How Deep Is Your Love”, “Stayin’ Alive,” and “Night Fever.” The brothers also penned “If I Can’t Have You,” which became a number-one hit for Yvonne Elliman.
Sadly, Maurice Gibb would pass away in 2003 and Robin in 2012. But “Run to Me” got a second life in 2021 when Barry re-recorded it with country singer Brandi Carlile for his solo album, Greenfields. Greenfields features reworked versions of his Bee Gees hits, sung with country collaborators, including Dolly Parton, Jason Isbell, and Miranda Lambert.
This new version of “Run to Me” features a similar vocal arrangement to the original, with Carlile filling in for the late Robin.
Earlier this year, Barry spoke with Upworthy about his love for Bob Dylan and his opposition to the Vietnam War. You can read it here.
Here is the entire June 22, 1973, broadcast of The Midnight Special.
A gas station clerk in Detroit is being hailed a hero after he risked his life confronting a suspected kidnapper who came into his store. It all began at around 7:00 a.m. on Monday, April 13, in Hamtramck, Michigan, when a 16-year-old girl was approached by the suspect at a bus stop while waiting for her ride to school. The suspect pointed a gun at her and demanded she get in his car.
Thirty minutes after the abduction, the man took the girl into a gas station in nearby Detroit and forced her to buy him a pack of cigarettes. The gas station cashier thought the situation looked suspicious, a hunch that the girl confirmed. “When he asked her to pay for the cigarette, I said, ‘Stop. There’s something wrong.’ And she mouthed, like talked to me like with no sound, ‘Help,’” Abdulrahman Abohatem told WXYZ.
Abohatem put his life on the line to help the abducted girl
Abohatem asked the girl to come around the counter and get behind him. He walked outside the bulletproof glass, told the suspect to leave the store, and followed him out just as the police rolled up to the gas station. “I see the police outside. I point to him—’That’s the guy,’” Abohatem recalled.
The police were at the right place at the right time because they had been tracing the girl using her smartphone. After word spread of the abduction, a friend of the girl was able to track her location.
Gas station footage shows Abohatem following the suspect out of the store as the police pulled up to detain him.
@CBSDetroit@cbsdetroit Hamtramck Police say it only took 30 minutes to find a kidnapping suspect and rescue a 16-year-old teen on Monday morning. They say the armed abduction happened while the teen was on their way to the bus stop just after 7:00 a.m. The lead detective said… pic.twitter.com/GWkVP45yss
“One of her friends opened the location through one of the social media apps. I said, ‘Oh, I could see her location right now,’” Mohammed Alsanai, the principal at the girl’s school, Frontier International Academy, told ABC News. “As we show the police the location, informed the dispatch, and as she walked in and said she had the location, like the whole room froze, and we all look at each other like, ‘Here we go.’”
Amazing things can happen when people work together
It’s incredible that the girl was saved just 30 minutes after being abducted by a group of quick-thinking people working together—although some of them didn’t know it). It was a great piece of teamwork from the girls’ friends, school administrators, the police, and a quick-thinking clerk who trusted his gut and took a big risk to do what was right. The suspect was armed, so he could have easily been shot for confronting the man.
The entire situation is a great reminder that people of all ages and walks of life are willing to step up and do what’s right when someone’s life is on the line.
“It is very concerning because we’re talking about a child’s life here,” Hamtramck Police Chief Hussein Farhat said during an April 13 press conference. “It’s scary to [the victim’s family]. It’s scary to every parent who has children. So, we can only imagine what’s going through their head right now. Just want to make sure they know we’re there for them.”
My 80-year-old mother lives in a neighborhood most people would envy. It’s not fancy or desirable in a material sense, but it is rich in a sense of community. Her neighbors share home-baked bread and extra veggies from their gardens. They pet-sit for one another and chit-chat about their kids and grandkids. They borrow tools and shovel snow from one another’s sidewalks. It’s a beautiful thing.
My family’s neighborhood, just a mile away, isn’t like that. We live on a busy street. We don’t even have sidewalk in front of our house. Several homes around us are rentals where college students stay for less than a year. In the decade we’ve been here, we’ve only met three neighbors total, one of whom has since moved away.
We can’t have block parties because our road is an arterial. People can’t park on our street, so everyone parks behind their homes. There’s almost no natural opportunity to even see, much less talk to, most of our neighbors
How do you meet your neighbors when there’s not a natural opening to do so? Photo credit: Canva
The Anxiety
I’ve relied on “our block is just different” to explain away the contrast between my mom’s neighborhood and ours. But in reality, someone at some point took the initiative to create that community where she lives. There was no reason we couldn’t do the same with our neighbors.
So, why hadn’t we done it? Social anxiety. Simple as that. We’d have to physically go up and knock on our neighbors’ doors to meet them, and no one in my family felt comfortable doing that. We love people as a whole and want our neighborhood to feel like a community. But we would rather do almost anything than randomly knock on a stranger’s door and introduce ourselves.
So, we sat in that conflicted space for years, feeling silly about wanting to know our neighbors but avoiding taking action out of fear.
My fellow Americans, cheer the heck up and get to know your neighbors. I guarantee you will like them better once you do.
Inspired by friends who had visited their closest 15 neighbors when they moved to a new neighborhood, we decided it was time to kiss our comfort zone goodbye. We made an ambitious plan: Instead of starting small with just one neighbor, we’d spend one afternoon visiting the 10 houses we could see from our front porch. And instead of just introducing ourselves, we’d invite them all to a brunch at our house the following Saturday morning.
We made flyers with the brunch details and talked about what to say. We decided we’d just lay out how we’d been feeling:
“Hi! We live in the house with the white fence over there. We’ve lived here for 10 years and hardly met any of our neighbors, and we’re feeling kind of silly about that. So we wanted to introduce ourselves and invite you to a neighborhood brunch at our house on Saturday. Super casual. Bring something if you want, but don’t feel like you need to. Would love it if you could come. Our phone number to RSVP is on the flyer.Let us knowif you can make it.”
We prayed for courage, gathered our wits, and set out with flyers in hand.
(Those who don’t struggle with social anxiety may wonder what all the fuss is about. Let me put it this way: My family is not unsocial. We have lots of friends. But I would rather give a speech in front of 50,000 people than walk up and introduce myself to someone I don’t know. It’s hard to explain why that specific act is so difficult, but taking this step was a very big deal.)
No one was home at the first two houses. At the third, we met a man and his wife in the yard. As soon as we said, “We’re your neighbors,” and pointed out our house, their faces lit up. They were so happy and grateful we were reaching out. We had a lovely chat, and they said they’d try to make it to the brunch.
Of the remaining seven houses, three had people at home. One was a young family with a preschooler and twin newborns. Next was an older man who said he and his wife had lived there for 15 years. The last was a young mom with a two-month-old baby.
Again, as soon as we told them we were going around to meet the neighbors, their faces lit up with beautiful expressions of recognition. Yes, we’ve been wanting that, too. Yes, thank you for going out of your way to come by. Yes, we’ll try to make it. Yes, yes, yes.
We left flyers on the doors of people who didn’t answer and returned home, exhausted from the effort but invigorated by the response.
The What-ifs
As the Saturday brunch approached, the anxious what-ifs kicked in. What if no one comes to the brunch? What if people do come and it’s just weird? What if we run out of food? What if we unwittingly just invited a bunch of psychos into our home?
Anxiety excels at two things: Making excuses not to act and forecasting catastrophy once you do. We knew this, thankfully, so we sat in the uncomfortable uncertainty of what might happen and hoped for the best.
The day before, we received RSVPs by text from the first couple and a woman who’d found the flyer on her door. Okay, three new-to-us neighbors, two of whom we knew were easy to talk to. Totally doable, right?
Sharing a meal is a great way to start getting to know people. Photo credit: Canva
The Result
About 30 minutes before brunch time, our doorbell rang. It was the husband of the mom with the two-month-old, who wanted to thank us for the invite. They had hoped to make it but couldn’t, but he at least wanted to come by and introduce himself. He and my husband chatted for a few minutes. Before he left, they had already talked about swapping tools.
Those who had RSVP’d arrived shortly after 10:00 a.m., one with homemade bread in hand. As we were eating and chatting away about 30 minutes later, the doorbell rang again. A woman holding a plate of apple muffins introduced herself. She’d found the brunch invite on her front door, but accidentally texted the wrong number to RSVP. She apologized that she couldn’t stay, as she had company at her house, but she at least wanted to stop by and say hello. She came in for a few minutes to meet everyone, left the muffins, and returned to her house just across the street.
It’s a small detail, but I happily noted that she brought the muffins over on a real plate. Now I get to return her plate to her, like a true neighbor.
About an hour into brunch, the couple’s teen son showed up to join us. We were tickled to find out he’d been at a rehearsal for the same community concert our adult daughter was performing in the next day. We were already connected in ways we didn’t even know about.
"… the fanciest neighborhood and the fanciest apartment aren't necessarily the best places to live. The place you're going to be happiest living is where you have an opportunity to get to know and meet your neighbors." https://t.co/UbPBhtGEam
Brunch lasted a couple of hours. It was leisurely, friendly, and wonderful to see how the conversations flowed. It was also a good reminder that people actually want this. People want to know their neighbors. They want community and connection. Even if we have our own established social networks outside of our immediate neighborhood, there’s something special about getting to know the people who live around us.
I know some people already have this kind of neighborhood, which is great. And I know it all could have gone another way, too. Sometimes neighbors don’t get along, and in some neighborhoods, it might not make sense to do something like this. But most Americans don’t know any or only know some of our neighbors and we have a hard time trusting one another. A Pew Research survey found that most people say they would help their neighbors with various tasks, but far fewer believe their neighbors would do the same for them. Perhaps our perceptions of one another would be different if we actually knew each other.
My family is thrilled with how meeting our neighbors went and excited to make opportunities to meet the ones we missed. It feels like a solid first step in building that sense of community my mom and her neighbors enjoy so much. My only regret is that we waited so long to make it happen.
When Jorge Alvarez arrived at Rutgers University as a first-generation college student, he couldn’t find anyone who looked like him, a Latino man, talking openly about mental health. “I felt very lost,” he later said. So he decided to be that change. He revived the Active Minds chapter at Rutgers and built it into the largest student-run mental health organization on campus, with an intentional focus on creating space for Black and Brown students. He took that same energy online, building a community of over 115,000 TikTok followers through educational content on mental health, generational trauma, and cultural identity.
That trajectory led him, in 2022, to the White House, one of just 30 young advocates invited to the first-ever Mental Health Youth Action Forum, where he joined a conversation with Dr. Jill Biden, Selena Gomez, and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy to make the case for culturally relevant mental health care. He returned again in 2024.
To champion MentalHealthAction, #FLOTUS Dr. Jill Biden, SelenaGomez, and Surgeon General Dr. #VivekMurthy teamed up with @mtv to amplify the voices of youth activists and chart the path forward. @dometipongo spoke to Gomez about why it’s “OK not to be OK” and more. Head to mentalhealthishealth.us
Today, Alvarez is being recognized by Engage for Good as its first-ever Emerging Leader of the Year.
Now in its 24th year, the Halo Awards have long recognized the best corporate-nonprofit partnerships in the country. This year, for the first time, the organization is also recognizing the people behind the work: a pioneer who built the field before it had a name, a leader who has made it sharper and more responsive, and a younger voice who is pushing it somewhere new.
The Pioneer: Carol Cone
In 1983, a small shoe company called Rockport had a problem: nobody knew who they were. Carol Cone had an idea. Link the brand to something bigger than footwear — the emerging walking-for-health movement — and make the company a genuine champion of it. Rockport grew from a $20 million unknown into a $150 million brand. More importantly, Cone had stumbled onto something she would spend the next forty years proving: that a company’s values, done right, are a business strategy.She’s now known as the Mother of Cause Marketing, and the résumé backs it up. Cone founded the nation’s first cause marketing consultancy in 1980, produced more than 30 research reports that helped turn the field into a discipline, and has executed more than 250 purpose programs for some of the world’s leading companies. She’s directed $5 billion toward social causes through initiatives like the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women, the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade, and Aflac’s My Special Aflac Duck. She wrote the book — literally, Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding — hosts the Purpose 360 podcast, now more than 220 episodes in, and has mentored over 1,000 people coming up in the field.
Engage for Good is honoring her with its Lifetime Achievement Award. “She didn’t just contribute to this space,” said EFG CEO Muneer Panjwani. “She defined and legitimized it.”
The Collaborator: Karen Little
What sets Karen Little apart isn’t just what she’s built, it’s how she builds it. The head of Rapid Response at PayPal is known across the social impact sector for bringing people together in moments when most organizations are still figuring out what to do.
When wildfires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, Little didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. She activated PayPal’s financial tools, nonprofit partnerships, and giving infrastructure, moving resources to the organizations that needed them while the crisis was still unfolding. She has since helped write the playbook on strategic disaster philanthropy — the kind other companies can actually follow.
Her instinct for convening shows up elsewhere too. Little founded the Bay Area Social Impact Gathering, which started as a dozen peers talking over drinks and has since grown into a network of more than 250 professionals spanning corporate, nonprofit, and foundation sectors.
“Her balance between strategy and humanity is what sets her leadership apart,” said Panjwani. She is the inaugural recipient of EFG’s Impact Leader of the Year Award.
The Next Generation: Jorge Alvarez
Back at Active Minds, Alvarez has built that same personal conviction into a career. As Senior Manager of Corporate Partnerships & Engagement, he’s helped raise $6M+ for youth mental health and guided the A.S.K. campaign to reach more than 28 million people. He serves on the board of Youth MOVE National and was recognized as a 2023 Young Innovator in Behavioral Health.
“Youth and young adults are eager to lead,” he said when he received the award. “They just need organizations and allies to listen.”
What Comes Next
Carol Cone built the foundation. Karen Little is strengthening it. And Jorge Alvarez is one of the people who will decide what gets built on top of it. That’s what this year’s Halo Awards are really about, not just celebrating what the corporate social impact field has accomplished, but taking stock of who’s carrying it forward.
“Together, they represent a field that is evolving, deepening, and rising to meet a more complex moment,” said Panjwani.All three will be recognized at the Halo Awards Gala during the Engage for Good 2026 Conference, April 21–24 in Palm Springs.
Sabrina Carpenter seems to have been born on stage. There’s a clear ease with which she performs, often adding a cheeky layer of humor to her incredibly strong singing voice. It gives her that extra bit of magic that entertainers so often seek. So it’s not surprising that, when she was just 10 years old, she commanded performances.
In an Instagram clip making the rounds, we see her slaying “Come Together” by The Beatles. With total confidence, she punches every word of the John Lennon/Paul McCartney masterpiece, even daring to switch up a few notes. “He got feet down below his knees,” she croons, pretending, like many of us do, to know what it means.
The year was 2009, and Miley Cyrus had an online fan club called MileyWorld. Cyrus and her team held auditions for a show called “Are You a Superstar?” (also known as “Be a Star”), in which Carpenter auditioned. The clip notes that Carpenter’s fabulous performances didn’t go unnoticed: “She ended up placing third out of around 7,000 participants.” (Then-16-year-old Amy Colalella ultimately won the grand prize.)
The clip’s commenters—and there are many—seem truly impressed. A few note that she’s actually singing the Michael Jackson cover of the hit tune. This prompts some to argue over which version they prefer.
One commenter points out the meteoric rise Carpenter has taken: “15 years later, Sabrina became the second artist in history after the Beatles to have her first three songs land in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time.”
Another commenter believes Lennon would be proud, writing, “John would be smiling. A star is born. Love it. Stays true to the melody, but adds her style and flair. Good one Sabrina.”
Carpenter tackled other songs throughout the contest, including Cyrus’ “Hoedown Throwdown” and “The Climb.” She also brilliantly covered Christina Aguilera’s “Makes Me Wanna Pray.”
She even got to meet her Hannah Montana hero at a concert. According to a 2009 news story in The Morning Call:
“Sabrina Carpenter was in the front row for Miley’s ‘Wonder Tour’ stop at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia. She had a close view of Cyrus flying above the audience and riding a motorcycle. ‘I was kind of starstruck,’ Sabrina says. ‘It was a really awesome experience.’”
Sixteen years later, in 2025, Carpenter got the chance to pose with Cyrus at the Grammys. Kayleigh Roberts, a writer for Marie Claire, explained just how significant the moment was:
“Whoever said ‘never meet your heroes’ clearly wouldn’t have understood Sabrina Carpenter’s undying fangirl love for Miley Cyrus.
The fact that the ‘Espresso’ singer’s intense appreciation for Cyrus dates wayyy back to when she was just 10 years old is common knowledge on social media, where a photo of a young, fedora-clad Carpenter proudly posing with her idol has been making the rounds for years. So, when the singers crossed paths again at the 2025 Grammy Awards and posed for a modern recreation of the now-famous photo, fans were most definitely here for it.”
It’s once again proof that there’s room in this game for everyone, especially those with extraordinary talent. There’s no doubt that musical geniuses like The Beatles and Jackson helped pave the way for new artists like Cyrus and Carpenter to shine. And they will undoubtedly do the same for future up-and-comers not yet born.
The final performance of singer Marirose Powell has people welling up all over TikTok because of the soulful way she sang “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac while in hospice care. Powell performed as Stevie Nicks in a Fleetwood Mac cover band for over twenty years, so the song was a major part of her life.
A week before she died from cancer, some friends showed up at her home and asked what she would like to sing. “And she said, ‘I want to sing ‘Landslide.’ And so she sang ‘Landslide’ one last time,” Powell’s daughter-in-law, Sam Xenos, who posted the video on TikTok, told People.
In the video, Powell grabs the railing over the medical bed as she sings a song about the inevitability of the passing of time. The song had to have taken on an even greater meaning as Powell was in the final days of her life. “I’ve been afraid of changing because I built my world around you,” Powell sings. “Time makes you bolder, and even children get old and I’m getting older, too.”
“My mother-in-law performed as Stevie Nicks for decades,” Xenos wrote in a video overlay. “This was her final performance before she passed the following week.” In the caption, she added there wasn’t “a day that goes by that I wish we’d had more time with her. She was truly the only person I’ve ever known to leave people better than she found them. Until we can be together again, mama.”
there isnt a day that goes by that i wish we’d had more time with her. she was truly the only person i’ve ever known to leave people better than she found them. until we can be together again mama…
In her obituary, she is remembered for her “infectious smile” that “guaranteed to brighten anyone’s day and she was known for her incredibly kind soul and generous heart. She had the beautiful ability to leave all those she touched better than she found them.”
In addition to performing as Steve Nicks, Powell released 3 solo albums and worked as an ER nurse. As a lifelong musician, she would probably be more than pleased to learn that her final performance has touched many people.
“I hope Stevie Nick sees this. She would be proud to know that your mom sung her songs for decades,and her choice of this song was heartfelt,” one commenter wrote. “I’m sobbing. God bless you and your family. Your mom is beautiful,” another added.
“That might be the most touching performance of ‘Landslide’ to ever exist,” a commenter wrote.
Xenos and her husband, Powell’s son, are overjoyed that the video has gone viral. At first, she was afraid of how her husband would react to the clip being posted on TikTok. “I remember calling my husband nervous because he didn’t know I posted it,” Xenos told Upworthy. “He was over the moon after reading the comments and seeing people feel her genuine soul from that small clip. He asked me to post more videos of her and they have generated a phenomenal response. She was the most giving and generous person. I would tell her to post her music and she was worried no one would care. I’m so honored to have proved her wrong on that fact.”
Nicks says she wrote “Landslide” in Aspen, Colorado, at 27. “I did already feel old in a lot of ways,” Nicks told The New York Times. “I’d been working as a waitress and a cleaning lady for years. I was tired.”
She was also having a hard time in her relationship with Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. She composed the song while looking out her window in the snow-covered Aspen mountains. “And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills / Til the landslide brought me down.”
Here is a full performance of “Landslide” that Powell gave in 2016 at the Prospect Theater in Modesto, California. Jamie Byous joins her on guitar.
This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.
Grey hair has been a concern for people since before hair dye was invented. Some people pluck them and dye them as soon as they see them growing in, while others embrace the silvery hairs. Chiara Do’wal Sehi (Sunshine) Enriquez, an Indigenous woman from the Karankawa Tribe, recently shared her excitement about learning she had grey hair.
For a brief period of time, people were actually dyeing their hair grey prematurely. It wasn’t uncommon to meet a 20-something with “granny grey” purplish-silver hair, but the popularity faded nearly as fast as it started. But for Enriquez, grey hair isn’t a fad or something to hide. It’s a right of passage to celebrate.
During the colonization of the Texas Gulf Coast where the Karankawa originated, the Indigenous tribe was nearly eliminated. According to the Texas State Historical Association, the Karankawa people fought to maintain their land from 1685 until 1858 from French and Spanish settlers. Due to this multi-century, on-and-off battle for their territory, the tribe’s numbers became so small that they were considered “extinct.”
Enriquez is a descendant of the small number of Karankawa that survived. To her, living long enough to experience the growth of grey hair is a gift. The woman shares how much her “unruly” greys mean to her in a video uploaded to her Instagram page.
“I got my hair styled today. I don’t get it cut. It’s a cultural belief that I was taught by my mother. We don’t cut our hair, we let it grow. We save the cut for very, very serious and important moments in our lives,” she says while sitting in her car.
The woman explains that while she was having her hair styled, she asked the hairdresser about the texture of her hair. This is when she learned of her wiry new strands. She surprised hairdresser with her delighted response. “She said to me that it was because I had many little greys, and the unruly ones that were pushing up my other hair that weren’t grey were causing it to be a little bit frizzy.”
Enriquez lights up and smiles while recalling the moment in her hairdresser’s chair. She reveals, “And that felt so incredible. What an honor, and I was…I’ve only ever seen my head grow one grey hair, and even when I knew I had one grey hair, I was incredibly thankful. When she saw that I was smiling and so happy, she said, ‘Oh wow, you really must come from a different culture.’”
She later adds while tearing up, “I’m very happy to report that not only do I have for sure one grey hair, I have many. A plethora of grey hair. What an honor. What a fantastic gift to be lucky enough to see myself grow grey hair. That is so incredible. I am so lucky. What a life it has been. What a life it continues to be.”
Enriquez wipes away tears as she encourages others to embrace their grey hair. Viewers were moved by her joyfully emotional response to finding out she has a head full of grey hairs pushing their way through.
One person shares, “As a chemo patient I am always surprised when people are upset about their grey hair. I have come to see it as a privilege and dream of the day I might have greys, though my mom’s hair has never changed colors, and neither did her dads. Their hair has always stayed brown for some reason. Since my hair has begun growing again I have decided not to cut it for as long as possible. So I can say, I’ve been cancer free for this long, and show people my hair for reference.”
Someone else writes, “This had me in tears because i’ve loss so many people and im only 30 and the day i get grey hairs i will celebrate with them!”
Another person says, “i’m so happy to hear this expression of delight regarding your grey hair~ i am only just now getting greys & my own natural reaction was very different from my mom’s & grammom’s reactions~ i was surprised to find that i like seeing them appear~ hearing your perspective makes me think that it’s because i am not as tethered to the usa culture as they… so thank you for sharing your experience & offering food for thought~ & congratulations.”
“I have been allowing my greys to come in naturally and have stopped dyeing my hair and it’s very liberating and in a society where ageism is everywhere it feels like resistance. And I love that! I have more greys than my mom. :),” someone else shares.
“What a sacred and healthy perspective,” one person says.
Another reveals, “I love this so much! Thank you for sharing your joy and gratitude with us. I’m getting grey and have been oscillating between feeling happy about it and feeling like I’m not sure i feel “ready” to have grey hair.”
Enriquez says, “I’ve always been of the personal belief that humans take the longest to change the color of their foliage in observation of their reconnection with Mother Earth and the cyclicity of her seasons and transitions.” She then explains that trees change with the seasons, grass goes through a cyclical change, and even animals turn grey and calm with age. “And it has always been representative that you have lived a full life. Do you know how many people didn’t get to grow grey hair? Didn’t get to see the hair change? What a gift,” she adds.
