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We honor people who stick their necks out for the common good. Our trainings, books and blogs help them succeed.

Our media programs move people all over the world into action by telling them the inspiring stories of "Giraffe Heroes"—real people sticking their necks out to tackle environmental challenges, corruption, assaults on minorities and women, hunger, gang violence and much more. Giraffe Heroes International (GHI) takes the vision, strategies and materials developed by the Giraffe Heroes Project to countries where that inspiration and know-how can make a critical difference, helping people solve the problems that challenge their nations and their lives. To date, we’ve launched affiliates in India, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Singapore, Ghana, Argentina, South Africa and Europe. Now we need funds to up our game to fight the new dictator in Zimbabwe and to support the translation of our K-12 programs into Spanish for the Spanish-speaking world. Donate to help the Giraffe Heroes Project here: https://www.givingloop.org/GiraffeHeroes

10/27/2026

BECAUSE RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT TRANSFERABLE

As a Brahmin in India, Murlindhar Amte was born for a privileged life, at a comfortable distance from people of the lower castes. But after becoming a lawyer, a film critic, a pal of early Hollywood luminaries, and vice-president of his municipality, he suddenly made a dramatic course change.

It happened when the town’s garbage collectors went on strike. Amte was helping collect trash when he came upon a heap of garbage that moved. When he saw that the heap was a l***r, Amte fled in horror. During the sleepless night that followed, Amte realized that he had fallen short of the name Gandhi had given him, when he was a younger man: “Fearless Seeker.” In the morning, he gave up the law and his writing, found the l***r and nursed him until the man died.

In those days the fear of catching leprosy was so great that Indians would not even stand in a l***r’s shadow. Lepers were at the absolute bottom of the castes. Amte, the Brahmin, decided to devote his life to them, using his savings to buy land and start a commune where l***rs could live and be cared for. Amte, his wife and two young sons arrived on their 25 rocky acres with six l***rs, 14 rupees and an old cow. They named the place Anandwan, “the garden of joy.”

Amte and the l***rs tilled and fed the rocky soil until it was rich and productive. More and more l***rs arrived when they heard about this place where they could find a home and useful work. “Work builds, charity destroys” is the motto of Anandwan. Within a few years the commune was self-sufficient in everything except salt, sugar, and kerosene and grew to include over 2,000 l***rs, plus hundreds of people who were blind or otherwise disabled.

“Baba” (father) Amte became a physician, specializing in tropical medicine, so he could give commune members the best possible care. His sons and their wives later became physicians at Anandwan as well.

Under Amte’s guidance the l***rs built a hospital, a school, a vocational center, a nursery, and an old folks’ home at Anandwan and two colleges in neighboring towns. As medical treatment of leprosy advanced, Amte expanded into other areas where he saw needs, including forestry and enviornmental projects to stop India’s deforestation.

Gandhi’s example set Amte on a 5,000 kilometer walk after religious conflicts climaxed in an attack on a Sikh temple in the Punjab. Amte walked to remind the nation that they were one nation, despite all differences among them.
Commended as a Giraffe when he was in his 70s, Amte was still advocating for the poor, for the outcasts, and for the preservation of the earth. Even though a spinal problem prevented him from sitting up, he did not absolve himself from his own admonition: “Responsibility is not transferable.”

UPDATE

When Amte was 86, he left Anandwan, the community he had founded, to lead villagers in central India in resisting the construction of dams that would flood their lands. His sons and daughters-in-law, all physicians, continued to provide care at Anandwan. In later years, Amte returned to Anandwan, confined to bed due to a back condition. He continued to write, talk, and give counsel, from his bed. He died of leukemia, in 2008. He was 94.

10/20/2026

ENSURING THE TRUTH GETS SEEN

Zach Roberts is a photojournalist who often goes undercover to infiltrate closed groups and report important stories.

Roberts infiltrated BP after the Deepwater Horizon explosion on the Gulf Coast. BP “scientists” were assuring the public that much of the oil spill would clear away naturally and that there was no danger to fish or to the industry that depends on the fish. Roberts came up with irrefutable evidence that millions of fish were in fact drowning in the oil, proving that the company was lying.

Roberts shot a documentary about “real Alaska” that included pictures of oil left over from the Exxon Valdez spill—21 years earlier. The photos refuted corporate claims that everything was fine.

He's also led investigations into voter purges; his reporting on the issue has been published around the world.

Roberts sees the risks he faces as part of the job: “For the past 10 years I’ve been on the trail — I've been to Ferguson, Euromaidan, NATO, OWS, and at two different Trump rallies. I was beaten and trampled at Occupy, arrested there, too. Had guns pointed at me in Ferguson and fed the best borscht on the planet by Ukrainians in Kiev.”

Where's he been more recently? A fellow journalist who's worked with him on numerous projects says that Roberts was in Charlottesville, Virginia “sucking in pepper spray” at the racist and anti-racist demonstrations there.

“Zach is more than just a news photographer. He’s an investigative reporter of rare skill and tenacity. All his work is done for little or, at times, no pay. It’s a non-stop quest for the truth, which has few parallels in American journalism.”
UPDATE
After many a death threat over the years, Roberts is currently being sued by a company that didn't like his revelations about their operations. You can track his work with your search engine.

10/12/2026

From our free, online storybank of real heroes...
STOPPING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Connie Kirkland founded a 24-hour crisis center for r**e victims, back in the 1970s when such facilities were anything but accepted.
Resources for serving her clients were scarce, but insults and obstacles were abundant, coming from people who didn’t want the issue of r**e brought to light. “At that time,” Kirkland says, “we didn’t have the support of the police or the prosecutors.”

For long, difficult years Kirkland persevered despite all obstacles; flash-forward and the picture changes dramatically.

Kirkland’s pioneering work has the broad acceptance it deserves. She founded the Northern Virginia Turn-Off-the-Violence Coalition, an organization of community agencies that educates citizens about the effects of violence and about alternatives to violence. She's written legislation, training manuals, brochures and reports, all focused on victims of crime and on r**e-prevention. She’s been a criminal justice analyst and a victim advocate at George Mason University, where she directs a program to prevent sexual assaults and to assist victims. She's organized dozens of community events promoting the safety of women, including luncheon talks, anti-violence fairs, self-defense days, rallies, and roundtable discussions.

“Turn Off the Violence Week,” an annual event she leads, presents self-defense workshops, forums for discussion and debate, showings of anti-violence media, and keynote addresses by national leaders, all focused on supporting victims and protecting their rights.

Kirkland works with local police in r**e/assault cases, but she also works without them, when victims choose not to inform the police. Most police departments have come a long way on the issue of violence against women since the 1970’s, but many women are still mistrustful of them, fearing that they will be insulting to a r**e victim or will view the crime as unimportant.

Kirkland speaks regularly, still working to help people understand the seriousness of the crime and to help victims get good medical care and fair treatment from the justice system.

“It’s time to create a better world, one without violence, and we can do it,” says Connie Kirkland.

Update: Kirkland relocated to Northern Virginia Community College, still educating, advocating, and making waves.

10/09/2026

From our archives...

A PIONEER IN THE COURTROOM

Eleanor Jackson Piel has been sticking her neck out ever since earning her law degree in 1943. Piel was a rarity just by making it into and through law school in a time when women’s career options were usually limited to teaching and nursing.
Her next goal was to become a litigator, but a female arguing cases in a courtroom was unheard of. Practicing solo, Piel has, for decades, taken on cases that most firms have avoided as too controversial—and insufficiently lucrative. A lot of Piel’s clients have paid her nothing.

It’s always been lonely and it’s seldom been profitable, but she realized her dream of being on her feet, before juries, saving lives and breaking ground.

A longtime opponent of the death penalty, she once read in her morning paper that lawyers were unwilling to defend death row inmates. She picked up the phone and called the agency described in the paper as working with prisoners who needed legal help. She was given a death-penalty case in Florida, where an overworked and amazed public defender said, “It was like she was calling to offer a fifty-thousand-dollar check.” Piel got a stay just 16 hours before the inmate’s scheduled ex*****on, then went on to prove him innocent and obtain his release—all this thousands of miles from her New York City home.

The 60’s saw Piel defending civil rights activists. In the 80’s and 90’s she pioneered in sex-discrimination cases, defending her clients against major institutions that had batteries of attorneys. In representing assistant professor Cynthia Fisher against Vassar College, Piel established that her client had been denied tenure because of “sex-plus” discrimination; Fisher’s gender plus her being married and a mother, had cost her tenure, Piel asserted. No woman who was married while teaching at Vassar had ever been awarded tenure in the hard sciences; Fisher had been denied despite having qualifications above men who did receive tenure. Piel won a rousing victory in federal court. The victory was reversed on appeal in a near-tie decision by eleven judges. But Eleanor Jackson Piel, courtroom litigator, had made her case: Vassar began tenuring married women in the hard sciences, and other colleges had cause to pause before using sex-plus to deny women tenure.

Update: Eleanor Piel died in November of 2022, at the age of 102.

10/05/2026

From our free online storybank ...

A LIFE OF COURAGEOUS COMPASSION

Amy Carwell is such a dedicated volunteer in the Cities in Schools program at her La Grange, Georgia high school that she’s missed her own classes while tutoring students in the program.

CIS students call her to talk about problems they’re having both at school and at home. They do their homework with Amy, at her house. She’s helped them get job interviews, coached them beforehand, and driven them to the jobs. She’s vouched for their applications at the restaurant where she has an afterschool job herself.

Some of her classmates think she’s odd for devoting so much time to kids who are younger than she is and are having academic and social issues. Amy sees her mother, a teacher, as a role model; and her mom thinks Amy’s doing good work. Her father, a La Grange police officer, objects to the fact that so many of the students Amy’s assisting have had encounters with his department.

Because her parents are divorced, Amy has gone on coaching, tutoring, and encouraging any CIS student who needs her assistance.

Amy was one of 30 young Giraffe Heroes chosen in 1990 to meet with young leaders in Ukraine and Russia.

Update: Now Amy Carwell Mains, she’s the proud mom of four kids and somehow also managing to be a supervisor at 911, a crisis intervener, and an active member of the National Association on Mental Illness.

09/28/2026

From our Archives: As news of sexual assaults against women fill the news, we're reminded of Giraffe Hero Lt. Paula Coughlin, a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot who refused to keep quiet.

BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON MILITARY MISOGYNY

It’s one thing for a whistle-blower to stand up to a company; it’s quite another for a whistle-blower to stand up to the United States Navy. And when that whistle-blower is a woman—well, that takes real courage.

In September 1991, when Paula Coughlin was a helicopter pilot and a Lieutenant in the United States Navy, she attended a Navy-sponsored conference called “Tailhook” in Las Vegas. Officially, the point of the conference is for officers to learn about advances in aviation technology. Unofficially, it was a wanton free-for-all that plays to the libidos of male officers.

At the 1991 conference, hundreds of Navy personnel indecently assaulted the attending females. Emerging from an elevator, Coughlin herself was forced to “run the gauntlet”—passing along a line of officers who pawed and groped her, grabbing her breasts and trying to undress her. As she later told the WashingtonPost, “It was the most frightened I’ve ever been in my life. I thought, ‘I have no control over these guys. I’m going to be gang-r**ed.’”

She was not alone. It turned out that at least 80 women were assaulted at Tailhook that year by these “officers and gentlemen."

Coughlin dutifully reported what had happened to her superiors. Her complaints were treated casually or dismissed outright. She filed a formal complaint and was reassigned to desk duty. After more efforts, Coughlin succeeded in obtaining an investigation by the Naval Investigative Service. None of the more than 1,000 Tailhook attendees who were interviewed were willing to testify that anything was amiss at the conference. Nobody saw anything; nobody heard anything.

Coughlin went public, and as a result some heads finally rolled. President George H.W. Bush saw the report on television and called Coughlin into his office and to the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Bush appeared emotional, saying that he could just imagine how Coughlin’s father—a former Navy pilot, like Bush himself—must have felt. On the other hand, a much less sympathetic Cheney told her, “Because of your complaint, I have had to remove the Secretary of the Navy.”

Several other officers were subsequently disciplined, if lightly, but the damage to Coughlin’s career was done. She was ostracized at work and reviled in public; in February 1994 she resigned from the Navy. She sued both the Tailhook Association and the Las Vegas Hilton, settling out of court for with the former and getting a favorable jury determination from the latter. After the trial, though, it was no longer possible for her to associate with anyone in the Navy population. “I was in a café just after the trial,” says Coughlin, “and an irate woman came up to me and said, ‘God forgive me, because I’m a Christian, but you got what you deserved.’” The woman was referring to the groping, not the jury award.

So Coughlin married a childhood friend—becoming Paula Puopolo—moved away, and took up both practicing and teaching yoga. All these decisions calmed her, drained her of her anger, and gave her some hope for the future. As she points out, “The philosophy [of yoga] opened me up to the idea that I could really stop hating . . ..”
Women are still treated harshly in the U.S. armed forces, with thousands of reports of sexual abuse filed against military personnel each year. But Coughlin hopes that her incident—with all the negative publicity—helped to start the changes that must happen, but she’s concerned:

“The climate for women in the military is probably better than it was just by the sheer number of females now entering. If a woman is lucky enough to work for a woman, she might get good support during a sexual-assault crisis—otherwise, it is completely up to the chain of command to informally or formally make the incident go away.”
With more Paula Coughlins speaking out, the incidents will not go away.

09/22/2026

From our free, online storybank —

TO SAVE THE BEARS

Ralph Flowers of Aberdeen, Washington, was a professional bear hunter for the Washington Forest Protection Association and then for the Weyerhauser timber company. Bears eat trees; the association and the company raise trees as a business, so Flowers was paid to kill hungry bears.

But Flowers thought there must be a way to make both the tree-growers and the bears happy. He figured out what it was in the trees that the bears liked and he started mixing up batches of bear food in the washing machine at home. His wife wasn’t too happy about that, but he kept working on his recipe until he got one that the bears really liked. Flowers made bear-food pellets and put them all through the tree farms he had to protect. And the bears went for it.

Flowers wasn’t reporting kills, and that endangered his job. But he convinced his employer that he was indeed protecting the trees; he just wasn’t killing bears anymore. The bears seemed to think Flowers’ pellets tasted better than the trees.
The bears were happy, Weyerhauser was happy, and Flowers was happy.
Flowers wrote a book about his experiences, The Education of a Bear Hunter. This brought about a widespread shift: Bears were not hunted as much because companies that went with Flowers’ system weren’t losing their valuable timber. Flowers had been in the right position to do the right thing. Even though he stood to lose his livelihood, he realized that sometimes you have to do what’s best for others. In this case, the “others” were large, furry animals who never had the ability to thank him.

Hunting bears doesn't make you a Giraffe Hero. But figuring out how to stop killing them, even if it means risking your job—that’s Giraffely.
UPDATE: Ralph Flowers traveled the world, sharing his strategies, and his recipe. As his nephew said, “If not for this gentle and extremely talented man, Weyerhauser would still be paying professional bear hunters to hunt them down and kill them.” Flowers died in 2004; he was 75.

09/18/2026

From our archives...

A GIRAFFE FINDS HER ALLIES

“It takes courage to find out you’re a caring person and to live it—at first it feels like a risk to become loving in a world that on the surface doesn’t encourage that kind of thing,” says Sue Silbert of Los Angeles, founder of One Voice, a private emergency aid program.

Although the non-profit One Voice operates year round, buying clothes and food for needy families, the Christmas season always brings a burst of activity as One Voice gears up to provide real Christmas dinners for 2,500 needy families. They provide not day-old bread, canned goods, and blocks of cheese, but such treats as hams, sweet potatoes, fresh fruit, dinner rolls, and pies—the kind of Christmas meals that memories, and family traditions, are made of.

One Voice began in a sociology class Silbert was teaching at Cal. State at Northridge. She persuaded a dozen students to hold a raffle that raised $1,000 for Christmas food baskets. Rather than buy the food at retail prices, they got the name of food broker Jack Berlin and went to the Wholesale Produce Market to buy the produce from him. That 4 a.m. meeting with Jack saved them far more than they could have imagined.

“It was prime time in a chaotic place,” says Silbert, “but Jack met us like friends. He started calling to people—‘Hey Harry, throw in three bales of carrots!’ He was down there with us literally grabbing these guys!”

Every December since, Silbert has put in a call to Jack Berlin and told him how many dinners she wants to put together. “He’d call me back with the price, like $18,000. I’d say, ‘I’ve only raised $12,000.’ He’d say, ‘Call me tomorrow.’ I’d call and he’d say, ‘The price is $11,500.’ And he would never acknowledge it as a donation. Somehow, each year, whatever we had to pay, that was the price. Of all the people we’ve worked with—and we have a lot of donations—I’ve never met anybody like him…Last year he donated about $20,000 of produce. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man.”

Berlin says he’s involved because Silbert is “an absolute tiger. I’ve never seen anyone so devoted to a cause. That impressed me.” The Los Angeles Times duly noted the dynamic effect when “Silbert’s ferocious idealism connected with Berlin’s generosity.”

From the dozen students who joined Silbert to start One Voice, the organization grew to over a thousand year-round supporters. The volunteers run fundraisers; solicit companies for trucks, boxes, freezer space and money; keep their eyes open for families in need; sort and fill food boxes, and help families carry the boxes home. Silbert says the volunteers continually thank One Voice for giving them the chance to package and give away food with their own hands. She sees volunteers and recipients operating as “members of the family,” sharing greetings and hugs as well as food.

“I know it’s crazy,” she says at a rapid pace, “but I still divide my time between teaching sociology and running One Voice.” Sue often finds 30 to 40 calls on her answering machine when she returns from class. But to her, there is little difference between her paid job teaching sociology and her volunteer job putting sociology into action. “I believe that theory means nothing,” she says, “if you don’t apply it to the world.”

“There are two kinds of hunger out there,” she stresses. “There’s the pain of not having eaten a decent meal in three days, but there’s also the very real need on the part of many well-fed people to become ‘reconnected’—to do something meaningful in their life and their community. People are anxious to make a difference, to be involved and feel legitimate.”

One Voice reaches out to both kinds of hunger. As Sue Silbert says, “One voice calls out and is greeted by one voice which in turn…” Jack Berlin is one of the voices answering her call.

Update: Silbert is still Executive Director of One Voice (http://onevoice-la.org/), which now focuses on providing not only emergency relief services to families in crises but also a Scholars Program (students from low-income families receive college scholarships: All One Voice Scholars gain admission, and 95% graduate), a Clothing and Furniture Program (in addition to appliances and household goods), a Schools Program (children attending private schools “adopt” low-income families, participate in activities with them, and raise money to purchase necessities), and a Summer Camp Program (low-income children attend a one-week YMCA camp located in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles).

Not surprisingly, Silbert remains dedicated to her cause(s). As she says about the One Voice Scholars students: “Any university would be lucky and even grateful to have these students at their school; the trick is finding them. Our relationship with these universities is great, but that doesn’t help the kids who aren’t in One Voice. More needs to be done.”

09/14/2026

A FIRST-NATIONS WARRIOR
What do you do when your land is threatened, when your rights are ignored, when your community's health and safety are essentially sold to the highest corporate bidder? Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN)-1,000 members living on four reserves in northeastern Alberta, Canada-knows what to do: fight.
Alberta, Canada, is the ACFN's home-traditionally, culturally, geographically, politically. But that home is threatened because of the oil and tar sands industry. Oil and natural gas wells leave toxic wastes that contaminate plants as well as animals and their feeding habitats. They create huge amounts of greenhouse gases. They infringe on natives' rights to hunt, fish, and gather. And they are correlated with numerous health problems, including particular kinds of cancer. Those wells continue to pollute the land, water, and air.
At one point Adam and the ACFN were hoping that the provincial government would stop the encroachment on their land, but in 2012 Alberta came up with a plan that put only minor restrictions on development and, according to Adam, fell drastically short of the protections needed.
"This is not our plan; it's the government's plan to annihilate our lands and our future," he said. "There are no commitments to our people and no protection of our lands and rights. We thought we were working towards a partnership with the government, but this plan doesn't reflect that."
For its part, Alberta's government says that it will continue to try to engage the ACFN community, but that it had to balance "job creation and recreational opportunities" with environmental and cultural protections. A spokesman for the government said that "we need to take into account a number of perspectives and try to balance them the best that we can and that is what we believe we have done with this plan."
But Adam claims that the plan is not nearly balanced enough, especially in terms of protecting wildlife such as caribou and bison and in respecting ACFN treaty rights. He's gone to court, numerous times, to have the ruling overturned. "The approval of the project," he says, "was hypocritical; on one hand they outlined all of the various violations of laws and legislation but ultimately approved the project 'in the public interest.' Frankly, it's insulting and unlawful."
The ACFN maintains that they're not against development; in fact, they've established relationships with several industrial companies. But they do point to an "Elders Declaration" that protects their land. "We will hold the line and challenge all proposals, projects, and approvals," says Adam, "that impact the lands, territory, and rights that are necessary for our cultural and treaty rights."
Adam and the ACFN have been drawing big names to their cause. In 2013, rocker Neil Young launched an "Honour the Treaties" tour, donating all proceeds of ticket sales to ACFN's legal fund. Other celebrities-some concerned with the environment, others with native peoples' rights, or both-have joined in.
Regardless of what continues to happen in the courts-and so far, decisions have gone against the ACFN-Adam will continue to defend the land and his people at negotiating tables, public hearings, courts, and rallies, no matter what the cost:
"We are fighting, and people across the country are waking up. I am here to tell you that the sleeping giant is being awakened, and this country will never be the same again until the issues affecting First Nations are addressed."

Keep up with his work at www.acfn.com

09/08/2026

PROTECTING THE HIMALAYAN FORESTS

The people of the villages in the Himalayan foothills understand the sacredness of nature, and know that when something's sacred, it can't be for sale. So when logging companies came into the Garwhal region of India, showing pictures of trees with money hanging from their branches, the people knew something was wrong.

The day the axe-men entered the area of Gopeshwar, the village men were off working. The women grabbed their children, ran to the forest, and together embraced the trees. "Before you strike at the trees, strike your axes at our backs," they said to the axe-men, who eventually withdrew.

The Chipko Movement grew from that encounter, chipko meaning "to embrace." And it gained a leader in Chandi Prasad Bhatt, who had already begun efforts to replant trees in the region. He saw that the women were instinctively working through non-violence, the basis of his own Gandhian efforts so he stuck his neck out to become a visible, vulnerable organizer and advocate of their efforts.

Chandi Bhatt trained village women to lead the work of the Chipko Movement, which includes efforts to halt logging, promote re-foresting, and bring villagers together to discuss their needs and those of the forest. He also organized a program to help educate villagers about alcohol use, which was an underlying factor in the physical abuse of women.

Deforestation in the Himalayas has become a major ecological disaster. The deforestation by loggers and road-building leads to drought, soil erosion, flooding and even starvation. Chandi Bhatt always advocates non-violent methods grounded in a deep focus on what is right and good, not what is wrong. He said to loggers at one demonstration: "Our quarrel is not with you, neither are we eager to fight your employer or the forest department. We just want to save our forest. So do not be frightened."

As a boy, Chandi was raised in a remote Himalayan village steeped in spiritual understanding that recognized all life as sacred. Priests in his family took care of a local shrine, and he often climbed through the forest to visit it. When he walked through the high pastures, he would take off his shoes so he didn't harm the flowers. In the protection of this sacred land, "It is very late to be working to save our environment, but when you live here, when its your own home, nothing is too late" says Chandi Prasad Bhatt.

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