Survivors, advocates, and builders who turned witness into action.
During the First World War, Lise Meitner trained as an X-ray technician and served with the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse on the Eastern and Italian fronts.
Read the full story →In 1894 Louis Brandeis spent nine months and held 57 public hearings on Boston's poorhouses, leading the city to completely reorganise how it cared for the poor.
Read the full story →In 1964 Marc Chagall created Peace, a stained-glass window at the United Nations in New York honouring Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who died on a peace mission in 1961.
Read the full story →In February 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital, the biggest individual donation to a US public hospital.
Read the full story →In October 2014 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan donated $25 million to combat the West African Ebola epidemic.
Read the full story →On 1 December 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged to give 99% of their Facebook shares, then worth about $45 billion, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Read the full story →In December 2013 Mark Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares, worth about $990 million, to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest charitable gift on public record that year.
Read the full story →In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in signing the Giving Pledge, promising to give at least half his wealth to charity.
Read the full story →Marshall Nirenberg protested Brazil's 1969 purge of scientists, backed appeals against hunger and nuclear escalation, and urged ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Read the full story →In 1993 Maurice Sendak published We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, a picture book about the AIDS crisis.
Read the full story →Since 2012 Bloomberg Philanthropies has funded drowning prevention in Bangladesh through childcare and swimming lessons; child drowning deaths fell by 80%.
Read the full story →In 2011 Michael Bloomberg gave 50 million dollars to the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, expanding its push to replace coal-fired power plants with clean energy.
Read the full story →Michael Bloomberg gave 100 million dollars in 2020 and 600 million dollars in 2024 to America's four historically Black medical schools.
Read the full story →In 2024 Michael Bloomberg gave 1 billion dollars so that medical school at Johns Hopkins would be tuition-free for students from families earning under 300,000 dollars.
Read the full story →Michael Bloomberg’s foundation has committed more than $1.6 billion since 2007 to reduce tobacco use, making it the developing world’s biggest funder of tobacco control.
Read the full story →Bloomberg Philanthropies has committed $865 million to global road safety since 2007, partnering with the WHO from 2009, and has given $200 million to help eradicate polio.
Read the full story →Michael and Rita Schwerner took over CORE's Meridian field office in 1964 and set up a community centre for Black residents as a base for grassroots organising.
Read the full story →As a boy Michael Schwerner protected the young Robert Reich from bullies; Reich, later US Secretary of Labor, said it inspired him to protect the powerless.
Read the full story →Michael Schwerner left graduate school to work as a social worker in a Lower East Side housing project, where he was known for his special rapport with teenagers.
Read the full story →The Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation, founded in 2006, pays teams of scientists at many institutions to work together on new treatments for cancers such as melanoma, ovarian cancer and multiple myeloma.
Read the full story →Dr. Miriam Adelson, an Israeli physician, spent decades studying drug addiction as a medical disease, working with methadone pioneer Mary Jeanne Kreek at Rockefeller University in New York.
Read the full story →Niels Bohr donated his Nobel Prize medal to be auctioned for the Finnish Relief Fund. It was sold in March 1940, and the buyer gave it to a Danish museum.
Read the full story →From 1933 Niels Bohr offered refugee scientists temporary jobs, money and Rockefeller fellowships, then found them posts worldwide. Those he helped included Lise Meitner and James Franck.
Read the full story →After escaping to Sweden in September 1943, Niels Bohr persuaded King Gustaf V to make public Sweden's willingness to give asylum to Jewish refugees. Over 7,000 Danish Jews escaped.
Read the full story →The only member of his family to survive, Otto Frank published his daughter Anne's diary in 1947 and founded the Anne Frank House, opened in 1960.
Read the full story →In 1988 Paul Newman opened the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut, a free summer camp for children with serious illnesses that grew into the worldwide SeriousFun Children's Network.
Read the full story →In 1982 Paul Newman started a food company, Newman's Own, on the rule that all of its profits would go to charity, and it has since given away more than $600 million.
Read the full story →Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in Berlin on 30 January 1933, the day Hitler took power, and helped about 7,000 Jewish children escape to safety in Palestine.
Read the full story →Swiss rescuer Recha Sternbuch smuggled refugees across the border, forged visas and helped bring 1,210 prisoners out of Theresienstadt in February 1945.
Read the full story →René Cassin served as vice-president of France's High Council for Wards of the Nation, which looked after children orphaned by the First World War.
Read the full story →Badly wounded in the First World War, René Cassin drafted and won passage of French laws to help war victims find work, and in 1930 secured the law on the combatant’s pension.
Read the full story →Through a foundation bearing her name, Rita Levi-Montalcini supported the education and research of girls and young women in Africa and Italy.
Read the full story →In 1974 Robert Solow helped found the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a pioneer in rigorously testing programs that help disadvantaged workers.
Read the full story →As a Cambridge student, Rosalind Franklin spent her vacations with the German-Jewish Refugee Committee in London, while her parents helped resettle refugees, including Kindertransport children.
Read the full story →When journalist Rose Kushner found a breast lump in 1974, she refused the standard practice of biopsy and mastectomy in a single operation under anaesthesia, and her campaign made the two-step procedure, diagnosis first and then an informed choice, routine around the world.
Read the full story →In April 1944 Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler escaped Auschwitz and wrote a report on the mass murder there, credited with helping to halt deportations from Hungary and save over 200,000 lives.
Read the full story →In 1951 Selman Waksman used half of his personal patent royalties to create the Foundation for Microbiology, which helped fund the Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers.
Read the full story →In 2009 Sergey Brin donated $1 million to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the organisation that had helped his family emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1979.
Read the full story →After Sidney Hillman died in 1946, his union created the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which has given Hillman Prizes for journalism in the public interest since 1950.
Read the full story →The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, funded and inspired by Sidney Hillman and Abraham Kazan, was the first limited-equity housing cooperative in the United States.
Read the full story →In 1937 Vasily Grossman became guardian of his wife Olga's two sons and wrote to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov on her behalf. A friend called it great bravery. Olga was released.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”