A Little Good News: 6 Things Worth Smiling About This Month
If you have ever put your phone down feeling heavier than when you picked it up, this one is for you.
This is a list of good news stories from the past month. Six of them, all real, all linked to the full story if one of them catches you. There is a sixteen-year-old who built a class her school was not offering, a fourteen-year-old on a bike who noticed something was wrong, and a four-year-old whose entire contribution was waving at people.
None of this is a promise that everything is fine. It is a record that good things kept happening in July while the rest of the noise was louder. That is a low bar. It is also a real one.
You do not have to read all six. Take whichever one sounds good and leave the rest.
1. A 16-year-old built the hurricane class her school was not offering
Elise Raurell is sixteen, lives in South Florida, and has now put more than 500 students through a hurricane preparedness program she wrote herself. It is called Storm Smart, and she built it as her Girl Scout Gold Award project.
It exists because she noticed something after Hurricane Irma. She lives in a place where hurricanes are a regular feature of the calendar, and her public schools were not teaching anyone what to do about them. So she wrote the curriculum herself: what belongs in an emergency kit, why you stay away from standing water near downed power lines, why you keep clear of glass windows during a storm.
The number she is proudest of is not 500. She says the best part is watching students learn the material and then go teach it to their friends, which means the whole thing keeps moving without her.
There is something in that worth borrowing if you are getting your head ready for a new semester right now. She did not wait for a teacher to assign it or an adult to approve it. She noticed a gap that everyone else had walked past for years and decided it was hers.
2. A 14-year-old on a bike stopped for a stranger in 103-degree heat
Royal Cothrun was riding his bike through Gilbert, Arizona when he saw a woman standing outside in 103-degree heat looking confused. Her name is Theresa Morgan. She is seventy-five and has dementia, and she had wandered away from home.
Royal is fourteen. He stopped, talked to her, got her into the shade, and stayed with her long enough to help her remember her son's phone number so he could call for help. Paramedics arrived and treated her for heat exhaustion. A fire department captain said the outcome would have been a great deal worse if he had not stopped.
His own account of why he did it is the best part: "I don't even know, she just looked like something was wrong, so I started talking to her."
His mom said he was calm and he was compassionate, which are two hard things to be at the same time when you are fourteen and a stranger might need you.
That is the whole thing. He noticed, and then he did not ride past.
3. A four-year-old in North Carolina got a whole street talking to each other
Roman is four years old and lives in Concord, North Carolina. Every morning he stood in his doorway and waved at whoever was going by. Garbage collectors. Delivery drivers. Neighbors on their way to work.
They started waving back. Then they started stopping to talk. Then they were showing up to his sports games and his birthday party, and at some point in all of that they met each other, which had never happened before. One neighbor summed it up: "If the world was like this child, what an awesome, awesome place it would be."
Nobody organized any of this. There was no app, no group chat, no neighborhood association. A four-year-old waved for long enough that a street full of strangers turned into a neighborhood, and now they wave at each other too.
If going first when social anxiety is loud feels impossible some days, it is worth knowing how low the bar for starting can be. He did not have a strategy. He had a doorway and a hand.
4. The boy who was given a piano by a stranger has released his first album
Five years ago, a piano tuner in Aurora, Colorado named Bill Magnuson read a newspaper story about a nine-year-old named Jude Kofie, went to watch him play at a talent show, and decided he was listening to something rare. Jude is autistic and had been teaching himself on a small electric keyboard at home. Magnuson also learned that Jude's dad, Isiah, had come to Colorado from Ghana and was raising four children while sending money back home.
So Magnuson gave him a $15,000 grand piano, and then added a lifetime of free tuning and professional lessons on top of it.
Jude is fourteen now. He tours. He has an album out called Introducing: Jude Kofie.
The piano would have been a lovely story on its own. The lessons are the part that turned it into a career, because talent nobody funds tends to stay a talent. A stranger met a kid once and decided he deserved the entire thing, not the headline version of it.
5. The UK is voting on its toughest tree and the shortlist is a lot
The Woodland Trust runs a Tree of the Year competition every year, and the theme for 2026 is "against the odds." All ten finalists are trees that had no business surviving what they survived.
The Crowhurst Yew in East Sussex took a direct hit from a cannonball during the English Civil War. Villagers found the cannonball lodged in the trunk in 1820. The Preston Twin in Brighton is probably the oldest English elm in the world and has been standing for roughly four centuries, including through the Dutch elm disease that wiped out most of its species. There is an oak in Dumfries and Galloway whose entire qualification is that it was struck by lightning and carried on anyway.
Voting is open until 5pm on 29 September and the winner is announced in early October. Anyone can vote, from anywhere.
Nothing about this is urgent, which is most of its appeal. If you are working out how to spend what is left of summer in a way that recharges you, ten seconds on a national argument about which tree has been through the most is a fine place to put some of it.
6. Food banks turned half a million tonnes of nearly wasted food into two billion meals
In 2025, food banks around the world rescued 500,000 tonnes of food that was on its way to being thrown out and turned it into two billion meals for 40.5 million people.
This is the one on the list with no name attached to it, which is exactly why it is here. Two billion meals is an enormous number of volunteers, drivers, sorters, and people spending a Saturday morning in a warehouse breaking down boxes. Not one of them made the news on their own, and the number does not work without every single one of them.
If the other five stories are about one person deciding to do something, this one is about what happens when a lot of people quietly decide the same thing at the same time and nobody bothers to count them until the end of the year.
Why these good news stories are worth keeping somewhere you can find them
Because a hard day goes better with evidence in your hand.
None of the six things above fixed anything on a global scale. A teenager taught five hundred kids what goes in an emergency kit. A boy waved at a garbage truck. A tree stayed standing after a cannonball. These are small and specific and checkable, and that is the point of them.
This list is not here to convince you that the world is good. It is here so that on a day when it does not feel that way, you have six real things you can point at instead of a feeling you are supposed to talk yourself into.
Come back to this one when you need it. There will be another list next month.
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