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Poor neighborhoods in the United States lack quality play spaces for children, also known as play deserts. An organization is enabling communities across the nation to build their own playground.

Great minds from Plato to Piaget have recognized the importance of play in healthy child development, but with bullying becoming more prevalent on school playgrounds and increased pressure to maximize school hours to boost performance on standardized tests, schools are struggling to implement meaningful recess. Playworks and other similar non-profit groups provide coaching for adults on how to help structure children's playtime to be healthy, productive, and enjoyable, while allowing children to explore on their own and develop positive relationships.

At least 25 percent of female veterans were sexually abused in childhood, making it more difficult to reenter civilian life. Volunteers of America runs a holistic housing program for homeless veterans in the U.S.

For decades, AIDS has taken the lives of millions of people and infected millions more worldwide. The key to reducing the effect of AIDS, and even potentially curing it, involves treating patients as early as possible after being diagnosed with HIV, before the disease damages organs. San Francisco General Hospital developed the RAPID program for this purpose, with the goal of “Getting to Zero” the number of new infections and deaths.

New York City black tar roofs cause a number of environmental problems, including air pollution, heat absorption that raises energy consumption, and storm water runoff in the sewer system. Efforts to turn these old roofs into green spaces cool the buildings, enable the containment of more rainfall, reduce sewer discharge, generate energy, and absorb carbon emissions. New York City has a pilot program offering financial help for green roofs.

A prosthetist from Texas visiting Jaipur Limb workshops in Honduras saw problems with their low-cost prosthetics - the issue wasn't the design of the leg, but the technicians at the Honduras workshops were people completely new to prosthetics who were given just eight weeks of training. Thanks to his research, Jaipur established a research and development unit to improve the limb.

In war zones, people have a difficult time finding clean water and safe areas to inhabit. Social media, smart phones, and technology applications are aiding in people’s survival. In Aleppo, Syria, the International Committee of the Red Cross posted a map on Facebook to show alternative sources of clean drinking water that reached approximately 140,000 people.

In India, 620 million people openly defecate outdoors, causing harm to hygiene, sanitation, food, and water resources. The president of India funded an initiative to build public toilets for the people in his country, but the people did not use them because of traditions and behaviors. The Total Sanitation Campaign is starting to change villagers’ minds by having local leadership persuade those who resist the toilets by holding community activities and creating special committees to maintain the sanitation.

Native American student graduation rates are much lower than that of any other demographic. The Red Cloud school teaches students on a reservation in South Dakota about the Lakota history to empower the kids and encourage resilience.

Despite strong evidence that school-based physical activity improves children’s cognitive skills, concentration, and behavior, schools under pressure to produce quantitative results and decrease bullying have drastically cut back on recess in recent years. An Oakland-based nonprofit organization called Playworks is working to make healthy play accessible for more children and show schools how productive recess can be to the whole academic world.