Community Heroes

Everyday heroes making a difference in their communities

A 25-Year-Old Grocery Store Employee Noticed Me Standing in the Soup Aisle for Too Long During the Worst Week of My Life – She Bought Me a Cup of Soup From Her Own Tips and Said Five Words That Made Me Cry for the First Time in Ten Days

by

I want to tell you about something that happened to me last February in the parking lot of a grocery store, because I think about it at least once a week and I have not found a way to stop. I am seventy years old. My name is not important. What is important is that … Read more

My Tenant Called to Tell Me She Had Cancer and Offered to Move Out So I Would Not Lose Income – I Told Her to Stay and Not to Worry About Rent, and What She Left on My Doorstep 18 Months Later I Will Never Forget

by

I am sixty-seven years old and I have been a landlord for thirty-one years. I own four rental properties. I am not a wealthy man but I have worked carefully and I have treated my tenants fairly and I have always believed that how you treat people when you have power over them is the … Read more

An 8-Year-Old Boy Asked for One Birthday Gift – Not a Toy, Not a Party, Not a Single Thing for Himself – and What He Did With 47 Dollars and a Wagon Has Now Fed Over 500 Homeless People

by

It started with a question. Specifically, the kind of question that only an eight-year-old can ask — simple, direct, and so morally uncomplicated that it makes adults feel the full weight of every excuse they’ve ever made. Eli Carter was in the car with his mother, driving through downtown Atlanta on a Saturday afternoon, when … Read more

Seventeen Neighbors Organized in Secret for Three Weeks While Their Elderly Neighbor Was Away – When She Came Home and Saw What They Had Built in Her Driveway, She Stood at the Door for Four Minutes Without Moving

by

Dorothy Hawkins, 79, had been living in her Greenville, South Carolina, home for 52 years. She raised four children in that house, buried a husband, outlasted two recessions and one hurricane. She was, by all accounts, a fixture of the neighborhood — the woman who always had fresh-baked cookies for the mail carrier, who remembered … Read more