Tags
More for You
-
A safe, stable home can change lives for the better. Here’s how Habitat for Humanity wants to make that possible for everyone.
Better health, better jobs, and a brighter future all start with access to a safe, affordable home.
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
- Shop or donate at your local Habitat ReStore
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.
Visit habitat.org/open-door to learn more and get involved today.
-
Women’s pet cockatiel proudly belting out ‘September’ by Earth, Wind & Fire has people rolling
Kiki remembers the 21st night of September ALL. THE. TIME.
“Do you remember…the 21st night of September?” has been one of the most iconic song openings for decades, as the R&B hit by Earth, Wind and Fire perpetually serves as a catchy favorite for dance clubs, movie scenes and TikTok clips alike. However, “September” has also gained wild popularity among an unlikely group: pet cockatiels.
One cockatiel in particular has taken a shining to the song to the point of obsession, much to the combined delight and chagrin of his owner. You see, Kiki doesn’t just like listening to the song, he sings and dances to it. Loudly. Over and over. At uncomfortable hours of the morning.
Kiki’s owner has shared multiple examples of her pet bird reveling in his favorite song, and it’s hilarious every time.
Watch:
But Kiki doesn’t even need anyone else around in order to sing his favorite song. Here he is singing and dancing all by himself when his owner left the room and left her camera running to see what he would do.
As cute and hilarious as this is, it surely gets old after a while, right? It’s one thing to watch in a video—it’s got to be entirely another to hear it all the time at home.
It’s also not just a Kiki quirk. Apparently, “September” is a “thing” among cockatiels. Other cockatiels have been known to love it and sing it, though not quite as well as Kiki does.
Someone on Reddit asked why so many cockatiels love the song—one person even said it was basically the cockatiel national anthem at this point. No one knows exactly why, but this explanation by Reddit user nattiecakes is as good an explanation as any:
“Yeah, cockatiels genuinely like the song in a way they don’t universally take to many other songs. My cockatiel is 17 and early in life basically seemed to max out his harddrive space learning a little bit of La Cucaracha, The Flintstones theme, the phrase ‘pretty bird,’ and this horrible alarm clock sound that is similar to the hungry baby cockatiel sound. We thought we could not get him to learn anything else because they do have some limits.
Then ‘September’ came. Every cockatiel loved it. We decided to see if our cockatiel loved it.
I sh*t y’all not, within a DAY he whistled the first three notes, which is really all that matters. He hasn’t been able to learn more, but he loves it.
Now our African grey whistles it to him constantly. He used to reliably whistle La Cucaracha to our cockatiel when our cockatiel would get angry and upset, and our cockatiel would start singing instead and forget he’d been upset. But almost immediately our grey switched to using ‘September’ 90% of the time. Like, it’s so plain even to our grey that ‘September’ is the song to unlock a cockatiel’s better nature. I think the grey likes it a lot too, but he has many other songs he likes better.
As for why cockatiels like this song so much… all I can guess is it really resonates with their cheery vibe. I think the inside of a cockatiel’s mind is usually like a disco.”
It’s pretty clear that Kiki’s love for “September” is unstoppable. His owner even recorded him singing it in slow motion, which is really wild to watch:
Rock on, Kiki. Just maybe not so early in the morning.
You can follow @kiki.tiel on Tiktok for more Tiki musical serenades.
This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.
-
Woman with unfortunate initials warning parents to think things through before naming their kids
“When you’re deciding what to name your kids, look at what their initials are going to be.”
A lot of thought goes into choosing a baby’s name. Will other kids have the same name when they start kindergarten? Is the name too dull? Is the name too original? Will the name lead to bullying? Will the name look good on a job application? Could you run for president with this name?
Popular TikToker Emily Windham, 23, from Birmingham, Alabama, is adding another question that parents should ask themselves: What will their initials be? Windham has gone viral for her video in which she reveals how disheartening it is when she has to write her initials, especially when they appear multiple times on a document. To put it simply, they are pretty yucky.
“When you’re deciding what to name your kids, look at what their initials are going to be,” she says at the beginning of her video. “Every time I have to initial a document, I have to write ‘EW.’ All these little initial lines just say EW EW EW EW.” The situation is frustrating for Emily because her parents considered naming her Alexia, which would have been AW, which is sweet. “That’s so cute,” she said.
The post inspired other people with unfortunate initials to comment; some of them are much harder to live with than EW.
“Yea… mine is XL,” Xitlali wrote.
“Mine is ‘BLT’ because it was my dad’s favorite sandwich. Mom didn’t notice until it was too late I don’t even like blts,” Bryony Tally Art wrote.
“Mine is ‘PP’ elementary and middle school was a blast,” Pais wrote.
“I knew a girl in school whose name was Amy, and her initials were also AMY, and I’ll never forget because that’s so baller,” Charlie wrote.
“My son’s initials are BRB,” Ashleigh wrote.
“My initials are EGG,” El-Glory wrote.
“My initials spell EMO and I think that’s awesome,” Elle wrote.
“Mine is OG… now I’m getting married and it’ll be OJ. Can’t decide if I like an original gangster or Orange Juice more,” Olivia wrote.
“Mine is ME, and when I sign out on duties at work, someone goes, ‘Can someone please stop signing ME and sign your initials?’ I’m like, those are my initials,” a TikToker named Madison wrote.
Emily’s story is similar to that of Samantha Hart, a woman who went viral on TikTok in 2023 because her name doesn’t exactly work well with modern email conventions. Clearly, her parents hadn’t thought that her name would cause any trouble in the late ’90s when email was a new thing. So, she made a video warning parents to think of their children’s future email addresses before selecting a name.
“My name is Samantha Hart,” the 27-year-old said. “Most companies use the email designation of first initial, last name, meaning my email would be shart.” A shart is an accidental release when one assumes they only have gas, which is not exactly how one wants to be known in professional circles. Imagine sending an email to someone at another company and their name comes up as SHart. YOu might even think that someone is pranking you.
“At every single workplace, I have received an email from HR the week before I start letting me know that my name does not exactly fit the company email structure as they would intend and [asked] would I mind if they gave me a different structure for my email,” Hart said. That’s kind of the HR people to help Samantha save a bit of face when starting a new job, so the thing she’s most known for, before meeting anyone, is her questionable email address.
Sadly, Hart will probably have to deal with this whenever she gets a new job. Hopefully, she enjoys doing long stretches with her employers.
This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.
-
Can you tell someone will die months before it happens? A hospice nurse shares the clues.
Even 6 months ahead of time, there are signs.
Death is a mystery in so many ways, despite the fact that we all know for sure it’s going to happen. We don’t know when we will go and can’t really be sure of what comes next, so whether we’re thinking about ourselves or a loved one, there’s understandably a lot of fear and uncertainty around death.
That’s why Julie McFadden’s work is so important. As a palliative care nurse in the Los Angeles area, who has seen over a hundred people die, her videos shed light on the process to make us all a bit more comfortable with the inevitable. McFadden is also the author of the bestseller, “Nothing to Fear.” The nurse’s experience helping people in their final stages has given her a unique perspective on the process.
In one video, she shared how she can see the first symptoms that someone is going to die a natural death about 6 months before they finally do. In other words, she can determine that someone only has half a year left to live when most of us have no idea they have entered the final stages of life.
What are the signs a person is dying at the 6-month mark?
McFadden says that people who are dying are usually placed in hospice care when the symptoms begin to appear around the 6-month mark.
“You will have very generalized symptoms. Those symptoms will usually be, one, you will be less social. So you’ll be more introverted than extroverted,” McFadden said. “Two, you will be sleeping a lot more. And three, you will be eating and drinking a lot less. Literally, everyone on hospice, I see this happen to.”
A heavenly view of the sky. Photo credit: PIxbay/Pexels What are the signs a person is dying at the 3-month mark?
You are going to notice more debility,” McFadden continues. “They will be staying in their house most of the time. It’s going to be difficult getting up and just going to the bathroom. Again, sleeping a lot more and eating and drinking a lot less.”
What are the signs a person is dying at the 1-month mark?
Something usually begins to happen in the final month of someone’s life. They start to believe they are in contact with others they have lost. It’s like they are there to make the dying person feel comfortable with their final transition.
“Usually around the one month mark is when people will start seeing ‘the unseen’, they have the visioning. They’ll be seeing dead relatives, dead loved ones, dead pets, old friends who have died,” McFadden said. “Again, not everyone — but many, many people will start seeing these things at around one month.”
Angela Morrow, a registered nurse at Verywell Health, agrees that people in the final stage of life often hear from those who have passed before them. Morrow says we should refrain from correcting the patients when they share their stories of talking to people and pets who have died. “You might feel frustrated because you can’t know for sure whether they’re hallucinating, having a spiritual experience, or just getting confused. The uncertainty can be unsettling, but it’s part of the process,” Morrow writes.
At the end of the video, McFadden says that the most important factors palliative care nurses look at to determine the stage of death are eating, drinking and sleeping. “Most people, a few weeks out from death, will be sleeping more than they are awake. And they will be barely eating and barely drinking,” McFadden said.
In the end, hospice nurses “allow the body to be the guide” as they help their patients transition from life to death.
McFadden’s work has brought a lot of peace to her followers as they go through trying times. “My mom is in hospice right now and she’s currently, I think, hours or days from death. YourTikToks have helped me out tremendously,” Deb wrote. “My grandma passed away in February, and she experienced all of this. this page brings me peace knowing everything she went through was natural,” Jaida added.
“Thanks, Julie. I volunteer in a hospice end-of-life facility, and this helps educate the families. Your posts are wonderful,” Grandma Nita wrote.
One of the things that makes death so scary is the number of unknowns surrounding the process, so it’s important that McFadden shares her stories of helping people to the next side. She shows that death is a natural process and that hospice nurses are here to help make the transition as peaceful as possible.
This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.
-
A Vietnam veteran stood on street corners handing out resumes for six years. One woman saw him and changed his life within 24 hours.
“Never give up, never give up hope. It can happen and it will happen.”
When a woman stopped to pump gas in Folsom, California, she noticed a 62-year-old man standing on the nearby street corner holding a sign. He wasn’t asking for money. He was handing out resumes.
She offered him cash anyway. He declined and handed her a copy of his resume instead.
“My heart sunk,” she later wrote. She went home and posted his story, along with his resume, to a private Facebook group called Folsom Chat. Within 24 hours, as CBS Sacramento reported, George Silvey had a job.
Sacramento veteran’s determination pays off
Silvey was a Vietnam veteran who had spent six years standing on street corners trying to find work the old-fashioned way. He’d had careers in maintenance, heavy equipment operation, painting, and in-home healthcare. He wasn’t looking for charity. He was looking for someone to take a chance on him.
“I know that once I get my foot in the door, I can make a lot of money real fast,” he told reporters. “All I need is the opportunity.”
This veteran’s job search was over
The Facebook post did what six years of sidewalk networking hadn’t. Summer Gonzalez, co-owner of KiKi’s Chicken in Rancho Cordova, saw it and called. The next day Silvey was washing dishes and taking out trash. He showed up early.
“How many people are really asking to earn their money when you see them out on the street?” Gonzalez said. “And how can you say no to someone that actually wants to take the initiative to take care of himself?”
She didn’t say no. Neither did Silvey when his roommate’s phone started ringing off the hook with offers after the post went up. “It threw me for a loop because I didn’t expect this to happen so fast,” he said.
On his first day he put on his uniform shirt and got straight to work. Gonzalez watched and said simply: “He’s a great guy.”
The importance of community
Silvey called it a lucky day. But the luck was mostly the woman at the gas station who saw someone doing exactly what she would have wanted someone to do — refusing to beg, asking instead to be given a shot — and decided she was going to make sure he got one.
“Never give up, never give up hope,” Silvey said afterward. “It can happen and it will happen.”
-
His neighbor kept stealing gas from his backyard. His two-part revenge ended with a police arrest.
He spent a week filling his gas can with urine. His neighbor handled the rest.
For a while, the homeowner couldn’t figure out what was happening. His five-gallon gas can kept coming up nearly empty, even though his lawnmower had a one-quart tank. The math didn’t add up.
He had a suspicion about the neighbor but no proof. So before security cameras were cheap and ubiquitous, he did something resourceful: he set up an old laptop with a webcam pointed at his backyard and configured it with motion detection software. Within days he had his answer. The neighbor walked into his yard and took the gas — literally five minutes after the homeowner left the house. He had it on video.
He didn’t confront him. He had a different idea.
Revenge comes in many different forms
For the following week, every time he needed to use the bathroom, he used the gas can instead. He then placed the now full, convincingly odored container back on the patio. He made a visible show of preparing for a trip — packing bags, checking his car — somewhere the neighbor could see him. Then he left for about an hour.
When he came back, the neighbor was in his front yard in full crisis mode, furiously yanking the cord on his lawnmower, which would not start. Shortly after, the neighbor tried to drive somewhere and broke down within a few blocks. The gas can on the patio was empty.
The story could have ended there — satisfying enough on its own. But it didn’t.
This neighbor dispute was not over yet
The neighbor, apparently unaware of how badly he’d misread this particular relationship, later asked the homeowner to drop off a ride-along application he’d filled out with his personal details. Around the same time, the homeowner happened to remember a conversation with a friend at the sheriff’s department, who’d mentioned offhandedly that ride-along applicants get checked for outstanding warrants.
The homeowner submitted the application. Authorities found the warrants. The neighbor was arrested.
The full story was posted to Reddit’s r/ProRevenge by u/MarchCompetitive6235 in January 2026 and quickly accumulated a large and enthusiastic audience. The subreddit, true to its name, has a high bar for this kind of thing — readers expect the revenge to be proportional, well-executed, and complete. This one cleared all three.
It’s worth noting that using someone’s personal information to submit an application without their knowledge occupies legally murky territory depending on the state, and this approach isn’t something to replicate casually. But in this case the neighbor had outstanding warrants, which means the only thing the homeowner really did was provide law enforcement with information they were entitled to act on anyway.
-
She left a harsh Goodreads review of her coworker’s book. She did not expect to hear it read back to them at work.
“I make a face that I hope reads as ‘hm, interesting’ and not ‘that was me.'”
When a coworker emailed the whole team a link to her self-published book, the Reddit user who goes by u/Halo9_Spectra did something most people wouldn’t: they actually read it.
They didn’t love it. The book struck them as generic, lacking originality, going through familiar motions without much of a distinct voice. So at 11 p.m., in a mood they describe as “mild annoyance,” they wrote an honest Goodreads review. Not cruel, they say, but not soft either. They assumed that was the end of it.
The review came up in the workplace
Two months later they were sitting in a work meeting when their coworker — the author — brought up the review. She read it aloud, verbatim. She called it “really challenging feedback.” She said it had been the most helpful thing she’d ever heard, that it had compelled her to completely rethink her approach for her next project.
The anonymous reviewer sat there making what they hoped was an expression that read as “hm, interesting.”
“I make a face that I hope reads as ‘hm, interesting’ and not ‘that was me,’” they wrote on Reddit.
Since then, the coworker has cited the anonymous review four more times across different meetings, each time framing it as “brutally honest in the best way.” The reviewer continues to attend these meetings. They have not said anything. They have no intention of doing so.
“I am never telling her,” they concluded.
The reviewer has no plans to come forward
The Reddit thread was predictably divided on whether the coworker’s response was genuine or strategic — some suspected she was fishing to draw out the critic, others thought the gratitude was real. One commenter suggested she might be “pretending to sus out who did it before she kills them.” Another simply said it was “an amazing compliment. Good for both of you.”
The most interesting part of the story isn’t really the review or even the meeting — it’s the thing it accidentally illustrates about criticism. A genuinely honest negative response, delivered anonymously and without any agenda, turned out to be more useful to the author than whatever supportive replies she’d gotten from colleagues who knew her. The reviewer didn’t pull their punches because they had no reason to. And that, apparently, was exactly what she needed.
The reviewer is still not telling her.
-
At 19, Jewel turned down a million-dollar record deal. Decades later, she says it was the best decision she ever made.
Jewel turned down a million-dollar signing bonus while living out of her car. She went to the library first to understand why she had to.
Before Jewel sold 30 million albums and earned four Grammy nominations, she was sleeping in her car in San Diego. She hadn’t chosen the situation romantically — she’d been fired after refusing her boss’s sexual advances, lost her paycheck, and couldn’t make rent. Then the car was stolen, leaving her fully homeless. She was 19.
It was in the middle of all of this that the music industry came looking for her.
Jewel had found a coffee shop that was going out of business and struck a deal with the owner: she’d bring people in, and she’d keep the door money. She started playing five-hour sets of original material on Thursday nights. Four people became twelve, became twenty, became fifty. A bootleg recording ended up on the radio. Record labels started showing up.
A bidding war broke out. The biggest offer on the table included a $1 million signing bonus.
She said no.
Before making that decision, she did something practical and slightly remarkable: she went to the library and read a book about the music business. What she learned changed everything. “I learned that you owe that money back,” she explained in an interview on ABC’s No Limits with Rebecca Jarvis. “If my record wasn’t successful within a year, I would have been dropped. I would have ended up homeless again. I would have had to make a record that was guaranteed to be a hit, which I didn’t know how to do. I was a folk singer at the height of grunge.”
In other words: the million dollars wasn’t a gift. It was a loan with conditions attached, and the conditions were essentially designed for her to fail.
She recently revisited the decision in a conversation with entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie, posted March 30. In it she described the guiding principle she had formed for herself, even without words for it at the time. “I made myself a promise that my number one job in life would be to learn. I called it being a ‘happy whole human,’ not a human full of holes.” She wanted to be an artist more than she wanted to be famous — and she’d learned enough about the industry to know those weren’t the same thing.
“Do I want to be famous and rich, or do I want to be an artist?” she told ABC. “I used that as my road map.”
Instead of taking the advance, she negotiated a deal structured around the back end — one that gave her room to build a fan base slowly and stay true to her music. Her debut album, Pieces of You, came out in 1995. It eventually sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone.
She has since become a bestselling author, a producer, and an advocate for mental health and emotional resilience. Her motto, which she’s repeated across decades of interviews: “Hardwood grows slowly.”
“If you can emotionally connect with a human being and cause them to emotionally invest with you, you have something,” she said. “Then you just have to go about it the old-fashioned way.”
-
A teacher came back from vacation to find “concerned” emails from parents. She couldn’t stop laughing.
“This teacher’s inbox is peak community.”
Ms. B, a 42-year-old teacher in Minnesota, left school on a Friday for a weekend trip to Mexico. When she got back she found emails from some of her students’ parents waiting for her. She wasn’t expecting much. She posted a video reading them on her Instagram page, @tlcwithmsb, and it has since been viewed more than 2 million times.
Minnesota teacher is not so vanilla
The first one started warmly — “I hope you are having a great time relaxing, you deserve it” — and then pivoted to business. The parent had heard Ms. B was in Mexico and had one request: real vanilla. Not the kind you get in Minnesota. The good stuff. She offered to Venmo her for the trouble.
Ms. B couldn’t fulfill the order. Her school district had blocked her email access during the vacation, so she didn’t see the message until she was already home.
The second email was from a parent concerned about sunburns. She had a home remedy, she explained. She would make it herself. Ms. B just had to come pick it up. “That’s seriously so sweet… I might actually try it,” Ms. B said in her video.
Parents made sure she wasn’t stranded
The third came after Ms. B had posted a separate video in a mild panic. She’d accidentally booked her return flight for Monday instead of Sunday and couldn’t easily afford to rebook. A parent watched it and immediately emailed with a solution: Ms. B was welcome to stay at her second cousin’s uncle’s place.
Ms. B said in her video that parents like these don’t get enough credit. The comment section agreed, filling up with people who said the emails were a perfect picture of what the right kind of school community actually looks like — the kind where the parents are as invested in their teacher as they are in their kids.
The vanilla, for what it’s worth, remains undelivered.
Family
Woman with unfortunate initials warning parents to think things through before naming their kids
Uncategorized
A Vietnam veteran stood on street corners handing out resumes for six years. One woman saw him and changed his life within 24 hours.
Family
His neighbor kept stealing gas from his backyard. His two-part revenge ended with a police arrest.
Get stories worth sharing delivered to your inbox.
Advertisement
