Eleven-year-old Ruby Kate has long been close to older folks. Her mother, Amanda Chitsey, works at nursing homes in northwest Arkansas, and Ruby Kate often goes with her in the summer. “I’ve never found them scary at all, so I’m able to just go up to them and ask if they need anything,” she says.

Last May, Ruby Kate noticed a resident named Pearl staring out a window. She seemed sad. “What are you looking at?” Ruby Kate asked. Pearl said she was watching her dog being led away by his new owner after a visit. Pearl didn’t know when she would see her dog again.

Ruby Kate and Amanda asked around and discovered that the nursing home didn’t allow residents to have dogs and Pearl couldn’t afford to pay anyone to look after hers. The Chitseys also learned that many nursing home residents are unable to afford even the smallest luxuries. So Ruby Kate decided to do something about it.

She started by asking residents what three things they wanted most in the world. “That’s a lot simpler than going, ‘Hey, what do you want?’” she explains. “They can understand you better.” Amanda worried that people would ask for cars and other things an 11-year-old   wouldn’t be able to provide. Instead, they asked for chocolate bars, McDonald’s fries, pants that fit properly, and even just a prayer.

“It broke me as a human,” Amanda says. “We left the nursing home that day and went straight to a store and bought as many items as we could.” Using their own money, the Chitseys granted the wishes of about 100 people in three months.

Then they started asking for donations, set up a GoFundMe page, Three Wishes for Ruby’s Residents, and raised more than $250,000 in five months. One of their new goals is to set up a communal laptop in one nursing home in each state.Ruby Kate doesn’t plan to stop there. “I consider kindness to be my hobby,” she says, “and I’m very good at it.”

You may not have heard of Ashoka, but for the past 27 years, this association, founded by Bill Drayton, has fought poverty (贫穷)and sickness, promoted education and encouraged small businesses. To support these worthy causes, Ashoka provides money for the world’s most promising "changemakers" seeking to solve urgent problems and would like to create a world in which every citizen is a changemaker.

Drayton believes that anyone can become an agent for change. The important thing is to simply give yourself permission. If you see a problem that you care about, you can help solve it. The young in particular are willing to accept this concept because at heart every child wants to grow into a happy, healthy, contributing adult. In fact, it is many young people’s ambition to set up programmes or businesses that improve social conditions. An excellent example is an Ashoka project started in 1995 in Dhaka, which handled the rubbish problem facing the city, helped local farmers and provided an income for poor people there .

When Masqsood and Iftekhar began to study the problem of all the uncollected rubbish that lay in Dhaka’s streets, attracting rats and disease, they discovered that 80% of it was natural waste. So they educated the poor people in the city to compost (把……制成堆肥)this waste. They knew that they would have a market for the end product because local farmers were struggling with chemical fertilisers (化肥) which were expensive and had reduced the natural minerals in the soil over the years. At first, they were refused, but once they were able to persuade them that there was money to be made , the project took off. In 2009 sales were $14,000.

Drayton is optimistic that in ten years Ashoka will be making really serious, practical progress in bringing about social change by changing the way we look at economic development.

In 2013, the carpenter from Schuby, Germany was surfing the Internet when he came across an organization called Be The Match, the largest bone marrow(骨髓)registry in the world. The 19-year-old didn’t think twice about donating, but he never found out who his marrow went to until years later when he received a message from halfway around the world。.

As it turns out. Dennis didn't just save another person. He saved a baby—little Gabriel Smith from Springfield, Illinois. As a little baby, Gabriel was diagnosed(诊断)with aplastic anemia and went into bone marrow failure. At just 14 months old, he received Dennis¹ lifesaving transplant.

Fast forward to 20l8, when the Make — A — Wish Foundation contacted Gabriel's family to offer the seven-year-old one wish. "At first, he said, "Take my donor to meet Mickey," Gabriel's mom, Lauren, told CNN. "But we couldn't do that, so he was asked to choose one: Meet your donor or go to Disney. He chose to meet his donor, Dennis, without any hesitation."

Fortunately, Dennis had already agreed to share his identity with his recipient's family. Even so, hearing from them came as a bit of a shock. "I was speechless, Dennis said. "I can't believe that this happened and that he survived the bone marrow transplant." In August, Make — A — Wish arranged for Dennis to travel to the U.S. for the first time ever, where he and Gabriel became conjoined.

While Gabriel didn't go to Disney World, he got something even better: adventures with his own personal hero. "He is part of our family now," Lauren said. "We are hoping this experience will inspire others.”

And incredibly, it did! On August 27, Lauren shared on Facebook that Dennis and Gabriel's story has already inspired thousands of Americans to sign up with Be The Match. With one selfless choice, Dennis sparked a wave of potentially lifesaving acts. He's not just a hero to Gabriel and his family: He's a hero to us all.