Non-profit grocery store Jubilee Market in Waco fills a gap for affordable, nutritious food

The lack of access to healthy food has always been a problem for the financially unstable. Food stamps can now be used to buy fresh produce at farmers markets, but greater success could be achieved by getting grocery stores involved.

Farmers in Vietnam face rising sea levels but rejected the city's water engineering projects. They prefer gradual measures to cope with climate change so scientists have allowed the farmers to steer the conversation.

Louisiana and Vietnam both need affordable solutions to rising sea levels. Leaders from Vietnam visited Louisiana to compare ideas.

Most insurance companies avoid insuring poor farmers because the transaction costs are too high, but a non-profit in Kenya created a sustainable way to cover them.

To decrease the nation's food waste, activists in Denmark showed the people that it was safe to buy and consume items that were very recently expired. From live demonstrations where celebrity chef features expired items in the entrees to reducing prices for out-of-date items, "Danes now throw away 25 percent less food than they did five years ago."

The non-profit Root Capital created a lending initiative in Mexico which helps mid-size rural farmers gain access to capital, skills, and consumer markets from which they would otherwise be excluded.

With child obesity on the rise, public school students have lacked the motivation and access to eat healthy food. Different programs around the country aim to improve student diet in public schools, including Real Eats for Academics and Life in Los Angeles and Cornell’s Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, by emailing nutrition report cards to parents, presenting the healthy food with aesthetic pleasure, and the arrangement of the food for access.

In an agricultural system designed for big-industrial growers, many farmers struggle to bridge the relationship between their produce and consumers, as well as strengthening local economies. The food hub is a collection of buildings that process and distribute the sale of local food. Eastern Market in Detroit is an example of a food hub that makes local produce accessible to low-income neighborhoods.

In a mountainous region of Lesotho, a man named Tsepo Kotelo visits 20 villages every week on his new motorcycle to provide health care to local villagers. The Elton John AIDS Foundation gifted the motorcycles to Kotelo and his colleagues, allowing them to increase the number of patients they visit by 600 percent. An organization called Riders for Health helps maintain the bikes, ensuring that remote villages will continue to receive medical care.

Ecological toilets that use natural composting to break down waste are simple to construct, waterless and are easy to fix. But as philanthropists are finding, getting these to those that need it most is harder than anticipated.