James Savage, a Wall Street analyst, was disturbed when he saw the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. The feeling continued when after the water subsided, the homes that survived were uninhabitable because they had been overtaken with mold. “There has to be something better we can do than this,” he recalls thinking. The solution he discovered was hempcrete, a mold-resistant cement-like building material made from cannabis.
The Kenyan government is installing water vending machines in the slums of Nairobi to address the city’s increasingly dire lack of clean water accessibility. In partnership with a Danish water engineering company, they’ve placed four of the water ATMs, which can be accessed with “smart cards,” around the impoverished neighborhood of Mathare. Users store “water credits” on their smart cards, which they can then use to purchase clean water. A simple swipe of the card sends water gushing out of a pipe into whatever container is positioned to collect it.
If you’re one of 65,000 undocumented high school graduates here in America, going to college can often feel impossibly hard. While some funding is occasionally available by the state, most undocumented students aren’t eligible for the federal grants, loans, or work-studies needed to graduate college. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently decided that they would donate $5 million to help fund college scholarships for undocumented students in the San Francisco Bay area.
Following the examples set by San Francisco and Seattle, Los Angeles City Council passed a law to raise the minimum wage to $15 from $9 with an overwhelming 14-1 vote. This victory for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s #RaiseTheWageLA campaign makes LA the largest city to join the fight for a livable wage. The new rules will be phased in incremently over the next five years—the first wage increase will happen in 2016, to $10.15.
