Truckers Against Trafficking are making an impact in reducing sex trafficking in the US by educating truckers, their companies, and the law enforcement that intersect with commercial drivers on how to spot sex trafficking and how to respond. To date, this 10-year-old organization has trained more than 700,000 truckers, and does further outreach with initiatives like "Man to Man" (which trains truckers to talk to other men about the issue) and "The Freedom Drivers Project" (a mobile museum about sex trafficking that goes to events like trucker conventions).

Participatory defense, is a model that integrates the family into the legal defense of someone being prosecuted for a crime. Loved ones can bring in evidence like photos and records that speak to the character of the accused person. In Philadelphia, the model is being implemented and already helped reduce someone’s bail from $500,000 to $0. Nationally, the method has been proven to be highly effective. “Over 10 years, participatory defense hubs have popped up in 20 other cities and reduced people’s sentences by 4,218 years.”

Immigrants are increasingly settling in the United States, but their cultural adjustments present economic and social challenges. Different states have started welcoming initiatives to aid in foreigners in their transition. Welcoming Tennessee has organized community gatherings and public talks, and has publicized how immigrants can contribute to their new neighborhoods.

Project ECHO - driven by a single doctor with a cause - pulled together a team of specialists to develop a model that combines technology with collaborative care and careful patient tracking to help cure for diseases spread to patients around the world through community healthcare agents, as opposed to only specialty centers. This kind of "disruptive innovation" is effectively working to demonopolize health care knowledge and access, and lends to a health system capable of meeting today’s soaring demands for care.

Obesity has become a health crisis for many women in the African-American community, but a group known as GirlTrek is working to change this by making exercise a social norm and creating supportive connections between women with shared goals. This new organization, which works to identify barriers that many in this community face, channels African-American history to encourage black women to walk their way toward better health.

Researchers are investigating how in a world of technology and social media, people feel more alone then ever and isolated from society. But millennials are creating a landscape of new institutions to meet their needs for community, purpose and, in some cases, spiritual experience.

Albina Ruiz, founder of the social enterprise Ciudad Saludable, works with people living in areas dominated by the trash dump to create a more formal system of waste removal for their health and the wider city's cleanliness. Workers who collect and recycle the waste are now employed by the city, own a micro-business, and no longer work under a social stigma. At the same time their efforts to clean up the city are working well, and the model is spreading to other Peruvian cities.

In 2012, Megan Marcus founded FuelEd, an organization that trains teachers in emotional and social health so that they can be adequately prepared for their role as a mentor to children. Their practices are based in traditional therapy education, and their 10,000 alumni go on to spread what they've learned through their own classroom or through administrative positions. In this podcast Megan talks about the inspiration behind FuelEd, the duties of running such an organization, and her hopes for their future.

An organization called The BMe Community (for Black Male Engagement) aims to combat the negative image of black men with hard facts and statistics of how they are actually improving their communities. Now operating in 6 cities, founder Trabian Shorters created a funding network that publicizes and supports the positive work that 194 black men are doing in order to change the narrative that black men are a problem only.

This podcast is an interview with Gonzalo Muñoz, the founder of a successful recycling organization called Triciclos that started in Chile and has since reached 8 other countries. Triciclos was the first certified B corp in Latin America, and Muñoz is now also High-Level Climate Champion for COP25 by the government of Chile. Muñoz shares his insights on the Triciclos approach, waste as a design error, climate change, and more.

Jennifer Pahlka founded Code for America, an organization that provides human-centered design tech solutions to government services. Now they have a growing list of requests from cities all over the US, a network of 44,000 volunteers nationwide who create "civic-hacking" solutions, and an over $10 million yearly budget.

Most tough guys with guns don’t want to shoot. Trained violence interrupters can therefore jump in and find alternative ways to mediate disputes. Hired from the same neighborhoods in which they work, violence interrupters and outreach workers form the backbone of Cure Violence, a neighborhood-level program that has gone global treating gun violence as a self-replicating disease.

After her experience arriving woefully unprepared at Dartmouth, Alex Bernadotte started Beyond 12, a tech nonprofit that provides virtual coaching to graduating high school seniors and college students. Beyond 12 has a special focus on first-generation college students and immigrants to help coach them through problems big and small. Beyond 12 now works with 120 high schools nationwide with more than 100,000 undergrad participants.

A nonprofit in Haiti called SOIL with a business arm called EkoLakay is bringing back the old-fashioned idea of a container-based sanitation system. Customers rent toilets with containers in them, use them, and return them to EkoLakay to then be converted into highly nutritious compost. Piloted in 2011, the program has been successful serving more than 1,000 households (growing by 40 every month) with a staff of 58 mostly local workers. They attribute their success to using "applied resilience thinking", having many actors at different levels, and constantly adapting to new solutions and knowledge.

A remarkable nonprofit in Baltimore sends teams of volunteers to give overwhelmed youths unconditional help and guidance that cannot be withdrawn.

By partnering with cities across America, the 100,000 Homes campaign is going directly to the streets to end homelessness - and it’s working. With roughly 700,000 people in the United States experiencing homelessness, this organization seeks to address that using a tiered system that considers individual health needs as well.