Civil society encompasses the nonprofits, advocacy groups, community organizations, and grassroots movements that operate outside government and business to advance the public good. This archive collects stories of civil society actors driving measurable progress on issues ranging from human rights and environmental protection to public health and civic participation.
The current estimates suggest that as many as 2,000 blue whales travel up from Mexico to Southern California waters every year, a large chunk of a global population that may be topping 25,000.
The Serum Institute of India and Path successfully tested an effective and affordable vaccine for meningitis, a disease that claims the lives of an estimated 250,000 people each year.
Tribal-led conservation is finally getting the funding it deserves — and the scale of this commitment reflects how seriously some funders are taking that responsibility. Fifteen philanthropic organizations have pledged $102.5 million over five years to support Indigenous-led stewardship, a meaningful shift given that less than 0.5% of philanthropic dollars have historically reached Native communities. The 574 federally recognized tribes already manage more than 140 million acres, yet annual funding for that work has remained strikingly thin. Because the pledge is voluntary and self-determined, sustained follow-through will matter far more than the launch itself.
Spanning more than 1,700 miles across Patagonia, the route crosses 17 national parks and protects more than 27 million acres of land.
The Yasuní Strip of Diversity and Life was created to protect the area’s Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation and to uphold the rights of Indigenous and farming communities in the region.
According to the airport, private and small business travel departing from Amsterdam emits around 20 times more climate-warming carbon dioxide per passenger than commercial aircraft.
Working in partnership with the government, Educate Girls operates in over 20,000 villages serving adolescent girls and young women who have permanently dropped out of school.
An incredible 92 percent of companies said they would continue to have employees work four days.
Australian wildlife is staging a quiet comeback, with 26 threatened animals — including the greater bilby, humpback whale, and sooty albatross — now recovered enough to fall outside the country’s threatened-species criteria. A new study in Biological Conservation, drawing on more than two decades of data, credits much of the progress to fencing off predators like cats and foxes, relocating vulnerable populations to island sanctuaries, and steady habitat care. Researchers call these “partial successes” — many species still occupy just slivers of their historic range — but the pattern is unmistakable: when people show up year after year, decline can be reversed. In a country that has lost more mammals to extinction than any other, it’s a hopeful blueprint for conservation everywhere.
Since 1983, the population of buffaloes has grown 77 percent, reaching 44,163 in 2021. And over the same period, the population of elephants grew nearly 300 percent, reaching 7,975.
