Giraffe Heroes

09/03/2026

Our latest One-Minute Hero video...

Romanian investigative journalist Paul Radu goes after corrupt, pow...

09/01/2026

SAVING THE EARTH FOR HIS GENERATION

Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez loves the outdoors. Maybe it’s the Aztec genes passed on through his father’s side of the family; maybe it’s the environmental activism modeled by his mother. Or maybe it’s just that the forest around Boulder, Colorado, is stunning, and Xiuhtezcatl has grown up loving it.

Whatever the reasons, when he was only 6 years old, Xiuhtezcatl realized that something was happening to his forest and gave a speech at a rally that was organized to make people aware of the human causes of climate change.

Before he was even a teenager, Xiuhtezcatl had persuaded the Boulder City Council to remove pesticides from parks, to require companies to contain coal ash, to implement a fee on plastic bags, and to end a 20-year contract with a gas and electric energy company (in favor of renewable energy). He accomplished the pesticide action by organizing a press conference of over 50 youth and over 200 attendees. He accomplished the coal ash action by speaking at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing. He accomplished the plastic bags action by creating a multimedia presentation using “plastic bag monsters” and showing it to youth and city representatives. And he accomplished the gas and electric energy company action by going door-to-door and by speaking at Council meetings.

Xiuhtezcatl’s message is simple: “We deserve to have a say in the kind of world we are going to inherit. Youth are innovative and have a clear understanding of the environmental crisis and what it will take to turn things around. We have a powerful voice, and people are listening.”

Update: Xiuhtezcatl was a plaintiff in the groundbreaking 2015 climate lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, a landmark case brought by 21 young American's asserting that their rights to life, liberty, and property had been violated by the inaction of the US government against climate change. On March 24, 2025, after years of roadblocks and previous dismissals, SCOTUS denied their appeal to have their case heard in the upper courts.

08/28/2026

ADVOCATING FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

While attending a seminar in India on HIV/AIDS, Nepalese doctor Aruna Uprety visited brothels where many women and girls from her home country of Nepal worked as s*x slaves; some of the girls were as young as 14.

One woman tearfully asked Uprety to “make girls aware of this crime, so they will not be lured by good-looking people with their false promises. If we were educated and knew of such things, we would have never come to this hell. Every day we live with pain and suffering.”

That incident in 1992 was the beginning: Upon her return to Nepal, Uprety established the Rural Health and Education Service Trust (RHEST) to prevent the trafficking of girls, end violence against women, and improve women’s reproductive health.

The organization started by helping 25 girls at risk of being trafficked; in a very few years, that number jumped to over 8,500. In 1997, Uprety coordinated with the American Himalayan Foundation to help fund a RHEST campaign called Stop Girl Trafficking (SGT).

Each year, about 20,000 girls are taken from Nepal—or unwittingly sold by their parents—and sent to India and other countries to work as slaves or prostitutes. They are forcibly kept in bondage—threatened, beaten, and otherwise abused. To add to the problem, governments and police in both Nepal and India often ignore the trafficking, especially if they’re bribed to do so.

Uprety’s campaign focuses on prevention; as she says, “Prevention is rescue without the suffering.” That’s why she focuses on education, vocational training, economic opportunities, and cultural change.

Not one girl in Uprety's program has disappeared or been trafficked.
Uprety doesn’t confine her efforts to s*x trafficking in Nepal. She’s taken on a variety of issues involving girls, women, and health in not only Nepal but also Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Iran, and Tibet. RHEST and SGT have funded girls’ education, provided training for health workers, and established mobile reproductive health clinics.

Uprety has advocated for increased access to health care, legalization of abortion, and the abolition of the centuries-old ritual called “chaupadi,” in which women are isolated to a shed or cave during menstruation and childbirth; many die as a result. In her book, Chaupadi: A Harmful Practice for Women, Uprety writes, “We cannot identify the perpetrator as man or woman. The religious and cultural leaders are to blame.”

As you might suspect, Uprety has made enemies while challenging governments and cultural mores. When she was campaigning to make abortion legal, she says, “My own colleagues were against me. . . . I was called ‘devilish’.” But Nepal did in fact decriminalize abortion. And the country now provides girls and women with increased access to health care, an expanded number of pharmacies, plus nursing care, and support groups.

“The field of medicine,” she says, “is not just about prescribing medicine, but about talking and counseling. Compassion is a huge part of the profession.”

08/25/2026

KEEPING ELECTIONS SAFE

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Secretary of State, has been a champion of making voting safe and easy for all Michigan’s citizens, even as a counter-force builds, determined to disenfranchise voters by any and all means.

During Christmas 2022, when she and her four-year-old were decorating their tree, her house was besieged by a mob yelling insults and threats. Though the mob was safely dispersed, she continued to be the target of national figures accusing her of stealing votes from Trump, challenging both her integrity and her competence.

Benson has worked for decades providing support for victims of hate crimes, helps direct a national program to improve civics education, and founded a nonprofit to support integrity and transparency in her state’s elections. Her fear of being followed, or her house surrounded again hasn't stopped her from making sure her state’s election are free and fair.

08/21/2026

CHANGING THE EQUATION AND SAVING LIVES

Victoria Hale was a pharmaceutical-company executive when she noticed an inhuman equation: only 10 percent of the industry’s R&D budget addresses infections in developing countries, where 90 percent of all infections occur. The reason? The diseases of poverty don’t bring in profits so for-profit corporations don't have the business model for creating and marketing such drugs. Hale, who is a biochemist, an economist, and a business visionary, decided to remove profits from the equation. In 2000 she formed the Institute for OneWorld Health, the first non-profit pharmaceutical company in the U.S., so that the medications to overcome debilitating and often fatal infections can be distributed to the people who most need them.

It's interesting that, for the most part, these drugs have already been discovered. What Hale is doing is to set up the means by which they can be made available in the developing world. “When I was at the FDA,” she said, “I saw many companies walk away from beautiful medicines because the market just wasn’t big enough.”

One case-in-point is an anti-malarial drug that can vanquish night sweats, fever dreams, and strength-sapping worms in the blood in three days flat. The problem was that at $1.50 a treatment cycle, the people who need this medication couldn’t afford to buy it. Hale stepped in, and put OneWorld Health on track to provide a steady supply of this medication for the 500 million people who become infected with malaria each year.

OneWorld Health is also working to develop and distribute drugs to treat black fever, Chagas disease, plus parasitic infections of the intestine and the other diarrheal diseases that kill almost 2 million children every year.

Hale asks, “Why in the 21st century are there people who have medicine for any disease, any complaint, while in other parts of the world, millions of babies die of diarrhea?”

She left her fast-track career in the pharmaceutical industry after the miscarriage of her second child, a personally devastating event over which she saw that she had no control. At that point she began exploring ways she could make a difference in the world—the ambition that had led her to pharmaceutical work in the first place. In researching the grim realities of global health, Hale found herself haunted by one appalling but accepted fact: 10 million children die each year from infectious diseases. When she realized that every year 10 million sets of parents undergo the same personal tragedy she had experienced, Hale thought, “I have to do something about this.”

08/18/2026

LIFE AFTER HATE

The founders of Life After Hate have braved threats from former “associates” to renounce their former lives as members of racist organizations and help other members change their minds and escape from hate groups. Those former lives?...

…ANGELA KING, a swastika-tattooed, active member of a gang of A***n supremacists, took part in the armed robbery of a store owned by Jews and was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six years in prison where she was “adopted” by a group of Jamaican women. “When I was treated with kindness and compassion,” she says, “it was like being disarmed. I wasn’t prepared for that.”

…ANTHONY MCALEER was a member of A***n Nations, recruited prospective members, and managed a racist rock band. He owned numerous rapid-fire ri**es and thousands of rounds of am******on, ready for what he said would be an inevitable race war.

…FRANKIE MEEINK was a skinhead leader, neo-Nazi recruiter, and member of a gang that regularly assaulted people. He ran his own cable-access TV show, “The Reich.” Arrested and convicted of kidnapping and assault, he spent several years in prison.

…ARNO MICHAELIS was a founder of the largest skinhead group in the world and lead singer with the race-metal band, Centurion.

…CHRISTIAN PICCOLINI joined the white supremacist movement when he was 14; he became the leader of the first U.S. neo-Nazi skinhead group.

…SAMMY RANGEL joined several gangs and was arrested and sent to prison for stealing a car. He came out of prison radicalized by racists he met there, and soon returned after an armed robbery conviction.

The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the number of hate groups in the United States has doubled in the last decade; about 80 percent of these groups are white supremacists. And three-quarters of deadly extremist attacks are carried out by far-right groups. These groups are known to pursue and harass anyone who leaves and opposes them, following a change of heart.

What changed for these five reformed racists?

…While she was in prison, King was “adopted” by a group of Jamaican women. “When I was treated with kindness and compassion,” she says, “it was like being disarmed. I wasn’t prepared for that.”
…Picciolini became a father. This, he says, challenged his “notions of identity, community, and purpose.” He left the neo-Nazi group he’d been leading.
…McAleer became a parent and then a single parent. Loving his children transformed his way of thinking about the world and about himself. “I felt safe to open my heart and learn to love again,” he says. “I learned that to hold the ideology of separation or racism, you have to have a closed heart.”

…Meeink formed relationships in prison that up to that time had been unthinkable; he was befriended by men of color.

…Michaelis stepped out of his a***n bubble and was astonished by the kindness of people of color who urged him to rethink his life.

…Rangel participated in an in-prison drug rehabilitation program in which he had to talk about his life, a life that included being s*xually abused by his mother and uncle when he was three and trying to hang himself when he was eight. He moved from self-pity and rage to remorse when a fellow inmate challenged him on his own failure to find a lost daughter.

Their new lives: King, Picciolini, McAleer, Meeink, Michaelis, and Rangel got together on a blog and then created a literary magazine to tell their stories. As Picciolini says, “We quickly started to realize that people from all around the country and all around the world had similar stories they wanted to share.”

That got them thinking about a huge further step, and in 2011 they formed Life After Hate, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to “inspire, educate, guide, and counsel” radicalized individuals.

Operating from their own experiences, the five co-founders have helped such individuals disengage from extremist movements. The number of requests for support coming in has increased from several per week to several per day.
“Everybody at Life After Hate is a former extremist, so we understand the [motivations] of why people join,” says Picciolini. "But, more importantly, we understand what it takes to get out of these groups." They travel around the country, they refer individuals for therapy and job training, they set up dialogs between former racists and members of groups who have been victimized by racists, they even provide—when possible—tattoo removal.

The Obama administration awarded Life After Hate a grant for operating costs. The Trump administration stopped the grant. The founders are determined to keep this crucial work going.

The nonprofit that honors people who stick their necks out for the common good

08/14/2026

HALF A CENTURY OF PROTECTING THE "GLADES"

From our archives: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, called “The Lady of the Everglades,” is a journalist, author, feminist, and environmentalist who has dedicated more than 50 years of her life to protecting the unique ecosystem of the Florida Everglades.
From her home base in Coconut Grove, FL, Douglas crusades for the wetlands, refusing again and again to back down against Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers and Florida businessmen who have threatened the half-million acres south of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, home to 67 threatened or endangered species.
It was Douglas who played a crucial role in making sure these precious wetlands of the southern Florida coast, the largest in the lower 48 states, were saved from those who, through the years, have wanted to drain them in order to start farms, build houses, or airports in their stead.

Douglas’ passionate love of nature has been the defining theme of her long life. After moving to Florida as a young woman, she worked as a journalist for the Miami Herald and eventually authored eight books, including the bestseller The Everglades: River of Grass, which redefined the popular perception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. She was an instrumental leader in creation of the Everglades National Park in 1947, as well as a founding member of the volunteer activist group, Friends of the Everglades, which has defeated plans to build airports three times since 1970.

At age 79, she took a central role as crusader for the preservation and restoration of the natural areas of South Florida, which she did tirelessly for 29 years, despite the toll it took on her fragile health. She was awarded the US “Medal of Freedom” in 1993.
Douglas did all her public speaking, organizing, and fundraising for free despite living in personal poverty. In 1990 Florida’s Governor arranged for the state to buy her house as an historic landmark, allowing her to remain in the house and live on the proceeds of the sale.

Update: Marjorie Stoneman Douglas lived 7 years after being commended as a Giraffe Hero at age 101, then the oldest person to be commended. (Sir Nicholas Winston was later commended at age 103.) Douglas died in 1998. Students at the Florida high school named for her have followed her lead into determined activism, following a mass shooting at the school.

08/10/2026

Zimbabwean journalist Pelagia Mupurwa was threatened, hunted, arrested, and jailed after she reported on a rich businessman's criminal dealings in a high-density, low-income part of Harare. Released when the news outlet withdrew the story, she's still reporting on things that shouldn't be happening.

08/07/2026

Twenty-one years ago, Northwest Prime Time introduced readers to John Graham and Ann Medlock of Whidbey Island, whose Giraffe Heroes Project encourages ordinary people to “stick their necks out” for the common good. Here's the story.
https://northwestprimetime.com/news/2026/08/01/twenty-one-years-later-theyre-still-sticking-their-necks-out/

08/04/2026

Minutes after grad student Amelia Bonow learned that the US House of Representatives had voted to defund Planned Parenthood, she wrote an online message of gratitude to the organization, thanking them for the abortion she’d had there. She ended with .

Tens of thousands of women responded. So did furious people threatening Bonow’s life. Frightened but determined, she put her studies on hold and started a website and a Youtube channel where women share their experiences and support each other in protecting the freedom to choose.