Alaska Church Builds Tiny Homes for Homeless Seniors

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Hey there, I'm Johnny Mack with five good news stories. A nice job by a church in Alaska. In Anchorage, they average seventy five to eighty inches of snow. Temperatures can drop down to around eleven to fifteen degrees fahrenheit. That's why the Central Lutheran Church built six tiny homes in their parking lot and welcomed homeless seniors to take shelter from the cold. Mark is one of the seniors and said, I'm just happy here. The project was founded by Our Backyard, a nonprofit founded by members of the Central Lutheran Church. Their mission statement is to live in God's abundant grace through acts of service and compassion. On their website, they write in Our Backyard as an opportunity to be proactive and addressing the needs of our unhoused neighbors.

0:50 With support for multiple faith based organizations, community groups, nonprofits, and local agencies, the project will serve as a model for other organizations to support unhoused community members in their own neighborhoods. The plan is to help people for six to nine months. One of the leaders of the group says, I feel it successful when you see people have already made changes in their lives. They're already being more responsible, They're already taking care of themselves better than they were before. They have hope, and I think that's huge. The rooms come with a single bed, a trash can, a mini fridge, and a microwave. Meanwhile, in Chicago, two ninety year old nuns have spent the last forty years advocating for immigrant rights. Sister Joanne and Sister Pat have been peacefully and respectively fighting for immigrant rights for forty years. Initially, they took a mother with five children who was seeking asylum that turned into seventeen apartments filled with seventeen asylum seeking families, and established nonprofit to fund their work. In the last three years, they've housed twenty five families, paying rent in utilities for a year, providing food, assistants, legal connections, and more.

1:49 Great job by them. Sister Joanne's ninety sister Pat is ninety five. I hope someone else picks up this work for you, and I hope you continue to do it for another twenty five years. A group of deaf scientists and educators have created four hundred British sign language signs related to environmental science. As time marches forward, new words enter the lexicon and we need to figure out how to sign for such things like In twenty twenty four signs for global warming, deforestation and another two hundred terms related to energy, sustainability and environmental impact were created. That gives us a total of four hundred signs developed by scientists, educators and sign linguists from the project at the University of Edinburgh's Scottish Sensory Center. A teenager has won the Princess Diana Award for an app that detects ticks and Oteona grew up in Connecticut, where she learned that tics were no joke. She grew a paranoid of the tics, and then she got sick. After a year of fainting and dizziness, she was misdiagnosed several times before test confirmed she had two rare, potentially life threatening tickborn illnesses. She started working on an app which is called d ticked It d tick t The app analyzes user submitted photos of ticks and generates a comprehensive risk assessment of the most prevalent tick borne diseases in the region. The app uses your geographic location connects with the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions TICK and Pathogen Surveillance Statistics. In December, she was one of thirty four US based winners honored

3:20 with the Princess Diana Award for her work and is now studying at Harvard. Good News if you're in London, there's a dramatic decline in deadly air pollutants. London had expanded its Ultra Low emission zone. A new report shows that the air is much cleaner and that greenhouse gas emissions have been dramatically reduced by roughly the equivalent of nearly three million one way passenger trips between Heathrow and New York. When they first started, the program was estimated it would take one hundred and ninety three years to bring the city's air pollution within legal limits. It might actually happen this year after just two years. Wow, that is amazing. And those are your five good News stories for today. If you enjoy the program, tell a friend about it. They might like it too. If you would like the program without commercial interruptions, I get it. If you're on Apple Podcast, click that banner that says uninterrupted listening.

4:08 And if you're not on Apple podcasts. Check the link in the show notes. We got a way for you to get it without commercials, and you have an awesome day.