Business
Looking for positive and inspiring business stories? From green operations to employee rights, from innovative corporate structures to diversity and inclusion, the Business section at The Optimist Daily has got the latest innovative solutions from the corporate sector.
This service allows employers to subsidize workers' childcare
The pandemic has exposed the systemic weaknesses in our societal structures, and one of these glaring shortcomings is the childcare industry. When the pandemic forced virtually all childcare centers to close, parents (especially mothers) were heavily impacted. Many parents had to struggle to Read More...
Fitness app offers free running safety feature to all users
A 2019 Runner’s World survey found that 84 percent of women have experienced “some kind of harassment that left them feeling unsafe” while running outdoors. To address the issue of running safety, popular fitness tracking app Strava is making their location-sharing feature free for all Read More...
Arizona abolishes peremptory challenges to improve juror diversity
Arizona’s state Supreme Court has announced a policy change to improve juror diversity and reduce racial bias in the legal system. The state will eliminate peremptory challenges, the practice that allows lawyers to remove jurors from a case without justification. In both criminal and civil Read More...
Donate and volunteer: Where to support Hurricane Ida victims
Hurricane Ida made landfall on Sunday as a powerful Category 4 storm. This is the largest hurricane to hit Louisiana since Katrina and the storm is causing widespread damage across Mississippi as well. Although it has been downgraded to a tropical storm as it moves northeast, it left one million Read More...
BNLP connects animal agriculture workers with more sustainable jobs
Plant-based diets are becoming more popular for a number of factors—there are plenty of health benefits to going veggie or vegan, plus the planet would benefit from less demand for meat and animal byproducts as this industry is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 emissions. However, the Read More...
The National Trust to adopt "siestas" due to rising temperatures
As the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report indicates, there is a lot that we have to do to reduce our impact on the planet if we want it to continue to be a suitable place for humans to live, however, even if we do enough to prevent the worst from happening, we will still have Read More...
This MINI concept takes sustainable car manufacturing to a whole new level
As circularity slowly expands across industries, car companies are beginning to explore sustainable design as the new standard. Emblematic of that is the MINI Strip — a one-off car that resulted from a collaboration between two British brands, fashion designer Paul Smith and automotive marque Read More...
Policy choices tied to lower poverty rates in 2021
We’ve written about the impact of stimulus checks during the pandemic, but the US also responded with additional measures like raising food stamps benefits, barring eviction, and offering financial support to small businesses. It looks like this policy choice paid off; poverty in 2021 is Read More...
Free education takes Congolese kids out of mines and into the classroom
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF, six million children (approximately one in four) were not attending school in 2018. To address this, the following year, the Democratic Republic of Congo became one of the last countries in the world to finally introduce free primary Read More...
You will soon be able to feed your cat lab-grown mouse-meat snacks
Most of the food that we feed or pet cats and dogs is meat-based which, as you can imagine, has its negative impacts on the environment. In fact, producing meat for our cats and dogs has a footprint of about 64 million tons of carbon emissions — that’s more than a quarter of the environmental Read More...