Dying of cancer is often a long and painful process. To be able to face that pain every day is an achievement in and of itself. But to face that pain while also inviting others into your life and your story is eminently admirable. With Written Off, Jeffery gave people a glimpse at what cancer does to its victims, their families, and their loved ones. Sometimes it was funny, and other times it was very sad. But with every entry she wrote during the blog's year of existence, Jeffery gave cancer patients, cancer survivors, and others little parcels of inspiration and hope that even in the worst of times, life can be worth leading.

Perhaps no Written Off entry summarizes Jeffery's ballsy, can't-quit attitude better than her last, penned just a month before she died and two months before she was scheduled to be married. She wrote it after a house shopping trip with Thostrup. In retrospect, it's both beautiful and haunting:

Sometimes it doesn’t feel real; how could all of this have happened to me? How did I come to be in such an unlucky situation? I don’t feel bitterness towards others, for what they have, but I can’t help but look around in restaurants and on the Tube and see healthy people with their whole lives ahead of them. I can honestly say I wouldn’t want anyone else’s life but I do envy their health. 

On our way back from a house viewing the other day I had to tell Tom that something had been nagging at me whilst we noseyed around other people’s homes. I was scared that we would find a new place, move in and then if I died he would be stuck in a three-bedroom house on his own. He reminded me, and I know he’s right, that we can’t live our lives like that. If we’d believed the stats we wouldn’t be having a wedding in two months time; if you let the cancer take over completely then you’re letting it win before you die.

Chuck Gulash looks at the most troubling problems in driver safety and sees a world of potential. An engineer by trade, Gulash is the director of Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) and spearheads a research initiative that brings a modern partnership ethos to tackle driver safety in the most vulnerable populations: children, teenagers, and seniors. Car crashes represent a common cause of death for these three groups, and by understanding each group's particular challenges, the center hopes to make a lasting impact on automotive safety.

Opened in January 2011 with $50 million in funding, the CSRC is based on three pillars Toyota sees as "collaborative research, crash data analysis, and outreach.” Working with external partners such as research hospitals, government agencies, and research institutions, the center is a radical departure from traditional auto research centers where the data proprietary.

The idea for the CSRC was born from Toyota’s success with previous partnerships it had developed with outside institutions. For example, a few years ago, Toyota partnered with two universities, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest, to delve into the effects of head trauma on the brain by studying football players. By attaching small devices to measure acceleration to helmets used by more than 400 players in over 250,000 hits, the team was able to collect data on head impact and its effects in real time.

The data collected provided essential information and insights into what happens to human brains in a collision scenario, and fostered advances in two different fields. Not only was Toyota able to improve computer systems that help simulate the injuries suffered in car crashes, but in turn, the universities were able to develop a safety ratings system for football helmets that today helps to protect student-athletes across the country.

“Collaborating with outside partners is at the very heart of how we work towards our goals,” Gulash says. By taking an integrative approach to traffic crashes (including vehicles, people, and infrastructure), the CSRC identifies gaps in its research portfolio and then reaches out to institutions with experience and strengths that can take research into a new direction.

The center currently has nineteen projects in its portfolio that tackle everything from studying cognitive driver distraction to developing crash algorithms that help prepare first responders to an auto crash by predicting the severity of injuries. With the growing population of older Americans, it is also exploring how age affects driving, including how posture and body shapes change as people age.

The collaborative ethos doesn’t end when technologies are developed. One of the most beneficial aspects about the CSRC is that most of the research and technology being developed will not be proprietary to Toyota. Instead, Gulash says that the center is committed to publishing its findings or sharing computer models as much as possible to help not just with driver and automobile safety, but to inform safety in non-automotive industries as well.

For the CSRC, success is defined precisely by sharing the research so that it can be adopted in the future to serve as a foundation for new developments and technologies. “This model allows us an unprecedented opportunity to share our time, talent and technology with the broader scientific community, and vice versa,” he says.

While CSRC is scheduled to run for five years, Gulash hopes that the initiative will be so successful that Toyota will continue to operate and fund the research center. Not only could the new technologies developed help Toyota’s own business, but also the car industry—and society—as a whole.

Gulash says, “A lot of people talk about ‘giving back’ to society. I think what Toyota is doing through the CSRC is ‘giving forward’ with advanced research that will benefit society well into the future.”

Learn more about CSRC here.

Photo via Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center

At the end of last month, less than two weeks after Bales allegedly killed Afghan men, women, and children for sport, 29-year-old Spc. Dennis P. Weichel Jr. did exactly the opposite, giving his life for the sake of an Afghan boy. Weichel was out on a routine convoy with other members of his unit when he noticed children collecting shell casings in the tracks. Most of the kids ran away when they saw the convoy coming, but one little boy leaped directly into the way of a Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle, a nearly 16-ton armored truck. Weichel was able to lift the boy out of the way in time to save his life, but he was struck in the process. He died a week later from his injuries.

Weichel leaves behind a fiancée and three children of his own, who will be awarded their father's posthumous Bronze Star. He will also serve as proof that there is plenty of kindness and decency in even the ugliest of circumstances. When you think of Robert Bales, think of Dennis Weichel too.

GOOD and Toyota, co-sponsors of the People Are Awesome series, bring you additional stories about individuals and organizations that are making a positive impact in our world.

If you're reading this article, you already possess a reading comprehension that is out of reach for many in America. More than 20 years ago, Sharon Darling set out to tackle this complex issue, launching The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) to work with families to combat low literacy, a hidden stigma that is often invisible in our high-tech, digital age.

Poverty, struggles over education and embarrassment are common threads shared by families who seek help from NCFL’s programs. The problem is nationwide, affecting both immigrant and native-born Americans in rural and urban populations.  

Through her work, Darling discovered that literacy skill is often an intergenerational problem, affecting parents and their children. The model for NCFL began in Appalachia, an area where Darling saw firsthand how great the need was.

“Seventy percent of the parents in those communities had never graduated high school, and about the same percentage of their children never made it out either," Darling says. "They were behind before they arrived. They couldn’t catch up."

After seeing the devastating effects on families, she realized that if she could teach parents literacy skills, she could also empower parents to teach their children how to read too. Not only does this create a positive cycle of learning, it helps parents participate more actively in their child's education.

Consider the Maldonados. When they moved to the United States, the Maldonados lived in a garage and had no bed – only a mattress on which to sleep. Baby Jose slept on that mattress with his parents. But this spring, thanks in part to Darling and NCFL, he will graduate from film school at Cal State Long Beach and can speak three languages.

His mother, who used to stand guard outside the gate of his elementary school – too afraid to leave him and too intimidated to enter the building – now speaks English, has a job and is pursuing her dream of a high school diploma.

Darling also realized that she'd able to do more by teaming up with a partner. More than 20 years ago, she and Toyota together began creating family literacy sites in communities across the country, so parents can go to places that look just like their child's school to take weekly or daily classes to develop their literacy and parenting skills. Immigrant parents also receive help with their English skills. This provides support to learn and also encourages an active role in the school’s community.

With this partnership, Toyota provides not only funding, but also the management skills and expertise that have helped make NCFL a long term success. For instance, at the start of their relationship, Toyota loaned executives to NCFL for a year to help implement the same highly efficient management processes that are used in Toyota's divisions worldwide.

“The questions that [Toyota] asked were not questions that I would have thought of,” Darling says of this learning process. “That has yielded great results.”

Over the last twenty years, $36 million dollars of funding from Toyota has allowed the program to expand to 50 cities and touch more than one million families. The program was also supported at the highest levels at Toyota: From the beginning, then-Chairman Dr. Shoichiro Toyoda embraced the program, which inspired him to visit families and gain an understanding of their problems.

Darling also gives credit for the program's success to the families themselves for having the courage to take their literacy into their own hands. “I’m most proud that they took advantage of the opportunity. They’ve really grown themselves.”

Darling describes how one particular Louisville woman and her family became empowered through NCFL. A mother with six children and an abusive husband, she struggled her entire life with literacy. “She ended up getting her GED. Her kids would run to the mailbox on the first of the month for the welfare check. One month, the check didn’t come, and she told her kids, ‘You’re not ever going to see another welfare check in that mailbox again.’ She’s now gone on to be a teacher. You can imagine the message that sends to her children.”

Learn more about how Toyota teamed up with NCFL here and how you can support the family literacy here.

Photos via NCFL

In 2008, the Los Angeles Times profiled Thomas Weller, the "Highway Angel," who until recently spent his days driving up and down the highway helping those in need of gas or other roadside assistance. And just a few days ago, the paper's videographer uploaded a video profile of Weller from the same year. He had been traipsing around San Diego's highways since 1966, carrying a card that reads:

You don't owe me a thing. I've been there too. 
Someone once helped me out just the way I'm helping you.
If you really want to pay me back, here's what you do.
Don't let the chain of love end with you.

He explains in the video that his trips have become more infrequent with rising gas prices—they range from every day to every few days—but he still thinks it's a worthwhile way to spend one's money. "Some people spend it for goin' to Disneyland," he explains. "Some people go on vacations. I go out and play on the freeway... When I get depressed, I go out on the freeway, and I help one person, and I come back lifted."

As the video follows Weller on his daily routine, it's clear just how much a small act of kindness thrills him. "I'm gonna give you gas and send you on your way, and you help somebody else to pay me back," he assures one passenger.

Sadly, as the Huffington Post discovered, Weller's tricked-out rescue car, "Beulah," has run into some trouble. After getting help last year from the San Diego Auto Museum and Ray Brock of Ray Brock Racing, Beulah's faulty engine was repaired, but shortly afterwards, Weller's car was totaled while he was on duty. This time, Weller is the one in need of roadside assistance—a perfect chance for those he's helped over the years (or those who admire him) to celebrate Weller's altruistic alternative to Disneyland.

Best known as Detective Shakima "Kima" Greggs on The Wire, Sohn has dedicated her time since the show ended to supporting the city that supported her breakout HBO role. A victim of a traumatic childhood that included abuse, drugs, altercations with police, and poverty, Sohn decided that when The Wire ended she wanted to stay in Baltimore and help citizens avoid the problems she once faced.

Sohn founded ReWired for Change with Wire costars Wendell Pierce and Michael K. Williamsm setting a goal of cutting down on crime and violence in Baltimore by educating young people through the arts and mentoring programs. “I felt like I was trapped in this acting game going, 'What is this all about? What is this all leading to?'” Sohn told NPR. "And in 2008, when I saw the kind of influence that a person who is in the public eye can have in the lives of those who have less, then I began to see, 'Ah... this is the solution. This is what it was all leading to all this time.' And once I embraced that, life came into perfect balance. And that's what it's all about.”

Sohn is not the only former Wire cast-member with an eye toward helping the community. Besides participating in ReWired, Pierce has opened up a group of grocery stores in food deserts around New Orleans, where he films Treme, screenwriter David Simon’s post-Wire project. It turns out there's a lot of reason to love The Wire beyond Omar's most quotable lines.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user qwrrty

Once she passed Dominy, the speeding woman attempted to pass more cars, veering in and out of lanes in an effort to get past a truck towing a boat. That's when the karma hit. While attempting to pass the truck, the erratic woman's old jeep, which had one door tied on with rope, began smoking profusely. A few seconds later, the jeep was on the side of the road and on fire.

At this point, Dominy, who'd literally been told to screw off by the woman in need, could have kept driving, confident that she didn't owe anything to that woman. But she didn't keep driving. She pulled over and rushed to help the person who only minutes before had sped past her with her middle finger extended. It was a good thing Dominy stopped, too: Not only was the woman on fire, so was her baby daughter. Dominy quickly rolled the baby girl on the ground then put both the child and the mother in her car to drive them away from the flaming vehicle. She then took them to her house, where they waited for an ambulance to get them to the hospital and treat their severe burns.

In the days since Dominy rescued the woman and her child, she's not heard a thing from them or their family. She knows they were treated and then released from the hospital after about a day, but nothing else. One would hope that the woman is a bit embarrassed at her behavior and not just ungrateful for Dominy's help. Either way, the moral is pretty obvious: Be careful who you flick off; you might need them to save your life, and they might not be as nice as Dominy.

The Deckers' "dream home"—a 8,000-square-foot mass of stone and brick—was no match for the tornado's 175-mph winds. Within minutes, it began crumbling, sending debris straight for the basement. As one particularly large piece of rubble headed straight for her 5-year-old daughter, Reese, Stephanie threw herself on Reese and her 8-year-old son, Dominic, covering them with her body until the storm passed. As she was pummeled by an entire house and its contents, Stephanie screamed to her children over and over, "We're going to make it."

After the storm, Dominic and Reese didn't have a scratch on them. Stephanie, on the other hand, had suffered such severe injuries that one of her legs was only partially attached, while the other had been considerably beaten. Unable to walk, she was bleeding profusely when her son fought his way out of the rubble and ran for help. The Deckers' neighbor, a sheriff's deputy, was able to run over and use a belt as a tourniquet to stop Stephanie's bleeding. "She's like, 'I'm dying, I'm dying,'" Lovins told the Today show. "Her kids were able to get out and call for help, and her kids saved her life."

Stephanie is now in fair condition at a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. Both of her legs have been amputated, but she kept her promise to her kids: They all made it.

When Nicole Graham accidentally rode her horse, Astro, into some deep mud on the coast of Geelong, an Australian town an hour south of Melbourne, she thought he might be goner. Weighing more than half a ton, Astro was sinking fast, and the tide was rising as the minutes ticked by. Terrified but brave, Graham, who was sinking herself, sat by Astro's side and held his head above the mud until rescue workers were able to come rescue them both. The Daily Mail has the amazing photos of the entire operation.

Graham and Astro's story is scary, harrowing, and inspiring—it's always amazing to see a human risk her life for an animal. For some of us, though, it's also nostalgic.

Looking at the photo above, any fan of the classic '80s film The Neverending Story may immediately notice its similarity to Atreyu and Artax in the Swamp of Sadness, possibly one of the most morbid scenes in the history of children's films. For anyone who's forgotten the heartbreaking moment, or—heaven forbid—hasn't seen it, we've included it above. Thankfully, Astro's fate was better than Artax's.

In August 2011, Riverside, California resident Rick Ruzzamenti donated one of his kidneys to an anonymous stranger in Livingston, New Jersey, out of the kindness of his heart. Ruzzamenti, a Buddhist, says he was inspired by hearing a friend's story of donating to one of her friends. When the anonymous man's niece, who had originally wanted to donate to her uncle but wasn't a match, found out what Ruzzamenti did, she decided to pay it forward by donating one of her kidneys to a stranger. From there, the chain was off, and seven months later, a total of 30 people have donated kidneys to strangers thanks to Ruzzamenti's initial kindness. The most recent recipient was Donald Terry, a 47-year-old man in Joliet, Illinois, who was told he'd have to wait for upwards of five years to have a transplant. Naturally, when a stranger stepped forward to help Terry out, it was quite a welcome surprise.

Despite the fact that his altruism may very well have saved several lives—67,000 people die annually from kidney failure in the United States—Ruzzamenti says he doesn't see anything too special about what he did. "People think it’s so odd that I’m donating a kidney," he says he told a transplant coordinator after undergoing a series of mental and physical evaluations. "I think it’s so odd that they think it’s so odd."

Dying at the early age of 52, and leaving behind a spouse, children, and extended family, is hard for anyone. But Aulger's suffering was compounded by the fact that Diane was pregnant, and wasn't likely to give birth for another two weeks. Aulger didn't have that long, which is when his doctors stepped in.

Diane's doctors induced labor on January 18, 11 days before Diane's natural due date. Luckily, the induction came just in time: Though he was tremendously weak, Aulger was able to hold his new daughter, Savannah, for 45 minutes immediately after she was born. He fell into a coma three days later, and he died two days after that. But for those brief minutes on Savannah's birthday, Aulger got to say both hello and goodbye to his baby.

Some may call it ethically squishy for the doctors, whose primary directive should be making sure the mother and baby are safe. But as long as they considered the procedure medically acceptable, why not deliver a baby and simultaneously fulfill a dying person's wish?

As the founding director of Trauma Services at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, pediatric surgeon Victor Garcia fights daily to give children a better chance at life. Garcia has faced many challenges that threaten childhood health, and it may surprise you that the one that he's impassioned about eliminating is overlooked by most people.

Just imagine there was a disease that was killing children across America. And imagine that this disease could be easily prevented by one everyday action. For Garcia, this “disease” is injury, particularly from motor-related accidents, because children in the U.S are more likely to die from injuries than from cancer or communicable diseases.

In 2004, Garcia and his team of hospital health professionals approached Toyota to help combat this statistic. They found a partner equally passionate and deeply invested in helping stop childhood motor-related injury. With funding from Toyota, Garcia and his team were able to establish Buckle Up For Life, a program offered by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Its goal is to educate and serve the two communities most affected by vehicular accidents.

While deaths from injury affect children across all ethnic lines and income brackets, statistically black and Latino children sustain injuries from motor-related accidents at a disproportionally higher rate for one simple reason: studies have shown that they are less likely to be buckled up or in a car seat.

The statistics are startling: Latino children are three times more likely to die in a vehicle crash than white children, while motor-related crashes are the leading cause of death for black children under the age of 14.

One challenge that Cincinnati Children's Hospital faced was understanding why minority drivers buckle up less often. Garcia found that the reasons were varied and diverse, spanning both cultural and economic divides. Low-income families may not have the money to buy car seats or a new car with working seat belts. The organization found that Latino drivers often come from backgrounds where the transportation contrasts greatly from fast-moving, American-style freeways and roads. Culturally, some drivers simply didn't grow up wearing seat belts, so they aren't in the habit of buckling up in cars. 

Overcoming these challenges meant changing attitudes about safety.  By collaborating directly  with the Latino and black communities through organizations like churches, Buckle Up For Life fosters a communicative approach based on teamwork so that the targeted communities are empowered by the program and feel a sense of ownership.

“We shared with [church leaders] the stark reality that youth in their congregation were more at risk from injury and motor-related injury than kidnapping or drug use,“ Garcia says. “Once they understood the data, they were resoundingly supportive.”

Buckle Up For Life’s outreach efforts include regular Sunday school classes and ministers have supported the initiative by including sermons dedicated to safety.  Congregations also learn more through hands-on vehicle safety events where safety practices are demonstrated and participants receive free car seat inspections. Rather than simply dictating to people what to do, the group approached them as equals with the community. "It was deeper, richer, and more than a collaboration," says Garcia. "We learned as much from the community as they learned from us."

Taking the time to gain community trust through the support of the churches and congregations has been essential to the program's impact. “There have been a lot of efforts to initiate community-based health programs, with very few successes. Those programs that were most successful were the ones that utilized and leveraged their influence that the church has in the community,” Garcia stresses.

Another important piece of the puzzle was Toyota’s support of the initiative. Garcia says, “Toyota realized that they had an obligation, a social obligation. We have not found any other corporation that has been so authentic in their commitment to help save people’s lives.”

So far, Buckle Up For Life has been extremely successful. In Cincinnati, the number of adults and children using seat belts and car seats has more than doubled after they participated in the program. In 2011, Toyota announced a grant of $1 million dollars in funding to help expand the program to cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Antonio.

With the expansion of the program, Garcia sees a common thread that ties diverse communities and peoples together.

“At the end of the day, we are all the same in a sense. Not that we all have the same personal experiences, but understanding that we love our children, and that we want to do the best for our children,” he says.

Learn more about how Toyota teamed up with Buckle up for Life here and how you can support the organization here.

Photos via Toyota in Action

The latest development in this growing movement is happening in southern Florida, where an energized county commissioner, Jose "Pepe" Diaz, is spearheading an effort to encourage local businesses to care for their communities. That effort began on Monday afternoon, when Diaz and nonprofit group Neighbors 4 Neighbors convinced a Sweetwater gas station to offer gas for the insanely low price of $2.14 per gallon today (get it?). In Florida, where the average price of a gallon of gasoline is nearly $4, Diaz's offer was one many drivers couldn't refuse. "We can’t wait 'til a hurricane or a disaster to come to deal with your neighbors in a neighborly form," Diaz told Miami's CBS affiliate.

Diaz, along with Sweetwater Mayor Manuel Marano, showed up to pump gas and wash drivers' windows. Their hope is that small kindnesses dispersed throughout the community will spur others to give back. And, at the very least, it's got them excited. "It’s not all about raising taxes and making laws," Marono said of his job. "It’s about giving back to the community to help them out."

Photo via (cc) Flickr user futureatlas.com

Next week, Feb. 13-19, is National Random Acts of Kindness Week, an annual event designed to prompt Americans to give back to one another in simple but significant ways. We, of course, encourage you to participate, particularly because our GOOD 30-Day Challenge this month is to be a better citizen. But one man in Chicago says a single week of self-improvement through kindness, or even a month, is too easy. That's why he's going for a full year.

It all started in December 2011, when Ryan Garcia was considering what his New Year's resolution would be. He thought about weight loss and other standard resolutions before looking at his five-month old daughter, Isla, and decided he wanted to do something that might one day inspire her. "I wanted to be a better person," Garcia told the Dayton Daily News.

With Isla on his mind, Garcia decided he was going to embark on a year of good things, during which he'd better the world—and himself—by doing a kindness per day for friends, strangers, and anyone else in need. He quickly got himself a blog and a Twitter account, which he's used to document each of his 38 selfless acts thus far. On Day 21, Garcia cleaned the snow off all the cars on his block, while Day 33 found Garcia taking an Iraq war veteran and his family to a Northwestern University basketball game. Some of Garcia's charities are bigger than others, but the overall effect as you click through his blog is awe-inspiring, and it will only become more so as the days go on.

If you'd like to support Garcia's project, or simply offer him words of encouragement, you can email him here.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user SweetOnveg

Lori Morrison has been selling flowers for three decades in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit whose name it once shared with a brand of automobiles that has since ceased production. The struggling auto industry gave way to a struggling Michigan, where nearly 15 percent of the population now lives below the poverty line. Wanting to give back to the people who have kept her flower shop running in these financially trying times, Morrison came up with something called a "Good Job Bouquet," a simple reminder that someone in the Detroit area still cares.

For the rest of 2012, Morrison will accept nominations for people in Plymouth and the surrounding area who deserve recognition for nourishing their community. "It can be anyone," Morrison told news station WDIV, "maybe the mailman we take for granted, someone who walked your dog or brought you soup when you were sick." Morrison will hand-deliver a floral arrangement to a winner each week as a token of her, and her neighbors', appreciation.

The most recent recipient of Morrison's new award was Lauren Langkabe, a restaurant owner who gave away food to customers on the honor system when her credit card machine broke last year. It was a simple kindness, just like a Good Job Bouquet is, but it's those simple, daily kindnesses that keep people going when things are bad.

Curious about how best to show her sanitation workers she cared about them, Huffington Post contributor Patience Salgado went out last week and asked them. "You know, we just need a little respect," said a garbage collector named Joe.

To honor Joe's wishes, Salgado has initiated what she's calling a "kindness mission" to promote sanitation worker appreciation. With the help of hundreds of kids from five different elementary schools in Richmond, Virginia, Salgado is seeking to put a message of kindness and thanks on garbage bins throughout her city.

"Sometimes it is the smallest act of kindness that makes the greatest impact on a person," she writes. "All I could imagine was Joe lifting can after can with notes of gratitude attached, throughout an entire neighborhood, maybe even a whole city."

To learn more about Salgado's sanitation worker project, check out her article. At the very least, we hope her story inspires you to remember what happens every time you throw out a diaper, a tissue, a pizza box. There's a human being somewhere waiting to take care of all of that for you. It might be nice if you took care of them sometimes, too.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Will Hart

That's what Ben Shaw does. Once a Scottish soldier fighting in Iraq, Shaw lost both eyes in a roadside-bomb blast in Basra. While many people might have allowed such an injury to ruin the rest of their lives, Shaw has refused to stay on the sidelines. In 2008, he taught himself to drive a racecar. Now, with a little help from his friends, Shaw is learning to conquer WoW.

For a while, people had tried and failed to help Shaw navigate WoW, which demands a lot of patience and persistence even without leading around a blind person. Eventually, Shaw met a fellow Scotsman named Owen, who has since acted as a sort of digital guide dog for Shaw, giving him verbal cues about where to move and when to strike. Owen calls Shaw, whom he met online about a year ago, is a good friend and a "delight" to play the game with. "Where people were seeing [leading Shaw] as a challenge, I see it as a delight to have somebody as committed as Ben to raid beside," Owen told WoW Insider in a new interview. "Ben and I clicked straight off the bat, and this made it simple to see Ben as a raider, not a burden."

Owen said he's gotten so used to the partnership that now it's harder for him to play WoW without Shaw than it is to play with him: "Nowadays, it's second nature to me."

Who ever thought that slaughtering orcs and ogres could be so kind and selfless?

When Zack Rosenburg and Liz McCartney took a trip to help rebuild homes in post-Katrina New Orleans, they intended to stay two weeks. But that all changed when they saw the scale of need when they arrived. Even six months after the hurricane, homeowners were still living in deplorable, substandard conditions.

Rosenburg, a lawyer, and McCartney, a teacher, had no family ties in New Orleans and had no experience working in disaster recovery or construction, but the slow pace of recovery efforts spurred them to action. Inspired by the perseverance of  the community and frustrated by the redundancy, lack of coordination, and efficiency of the recovery efforts, they left their lives in Washington D.C. and moved to New Orleans. “It was our only choice: we could be part of the problem, or we could be part of the solution,” Rosenburg says.

They established St. Bernard Project (SBP), a nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding homes in New Orleans.  Named after one of the hardest hit parishes, SBP serves the St. Bernard Parish area, the only U.S. county to have been declared 100 percent uninhabitable after a natural disaster. After the flood waters receded, only eight homes in the parish (of more than 27,000) were deemed safe.

Since its inception in 2006, SBP has grown into one of the most recognized organizations dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans and oversees hundreds of dedicated volunteers as they work to construct homes.  It has expanded with additional programs that offer mental and health services, jobs for returning veterans, and homeowners assistance. The organization works on 30 to 50 housing projects simultaneously, with each historically taking 12 to 18 weeks for completion.

Recently, SBP collaborated with Toyota to analyze shortcomings and develop a greater understanding about their building processes. No strangers to efficient manufacturing, the car company dispatched a team from the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), its   nonprofit affiliate comprised of production experts from across Toyota's manufacturing divisions. As highly trained experts in production efficiency, this team helps hundreds of organizations learn principles of quality, safety, productivity, and cost.  “Toyota believes in efficiency,” explains Rosenburg. “When they first came in they asked us, ‘Are you ahead or behind?’” Once the weak spots were identified, Toyota and SBP worked together to standardize processes across all the house projects in progress.

As a result of this collaboration, SBP significantly improved efficiency, cutting the amount of time volunteers spend building houses to 6 weeks in some cases, a 50 percent reduction. Across the board, overall construction decreased by 30 percent and with Toyota's help, they reduced the time and resources needed for repairing work. Every minute saved helps families get back into their homes more quickly and helps the organization move on to the next person in need. One of those people was Me'shelle Williams, who told Rosenburg, "Katrina took my childhood away. By rebuilding my home, [SBP has] given back my childhood.” She moved back into her home a full five years after Katrina.

So far, the SBP has mobilized 36,000 dedicated volunteers and built more than 400 homes for residents of New Orleans. Their work won’t end when they build the last house for Katrina survivors, however. Rosenburg sees a future where they will take their knowledge learned from both their collaboration with Toyota and their on the ground experience rebuilding homes to develop a model for future disaster recovery teams, both in the United States and abroad.

Currently, SBP has a waiting list of 130 families hoping to rebuild their homes, with more applying every week. Click here to learn more about Toyota's collaboration with SBP. And  learn more about how you can help SBP and families rebuilding their homes in New Orleans, click here.

Photo 1 via Flickr user St. Bernard Project

Photos 2 and 3 via Toyota in Action