North & Central America

This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Central America. Readers will find reporting on health, environment, community resilience, and policy advances across the region.

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Virginia governor restores voting rights to 66,000 citizens with past convictions

By / / Good News For Humankind

Voting rights restoration in Virginia has reached a scale in 2026 that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. A federal court ruled that Virginia’s lifetime voting ban violated an 1870 Reconstruction-era federal law — meaning most Virginians with past convictions are now legally eligible to vote without asking anyone’s permission. Governor Spanberger’s office has also proactively restored full civil rights to more than 66,000 people in just six months. A November ballot measure could make restoration permanent, though a requirement to pay outstanding fines first may still leave some people behind.

Bus, for article on Latin American electric buses

Latin American cities cross milestone of 10,000 electric buses

By / / Good News For Humankind

Latin American cities are proving that large-scale clean transit is genuinely achievable, with 10,000 electric buses now running across 80 cities in 13 countries — collectively avoiding an estimated 10 million tonnes of CO2 every year. Santiago, São Paulo, and Bogotá are carrying most of that weight, enabled by a financing model that blends regulatory pressure with structured funding. The electric fleet remains a small fraction of regional totals, and smaller cities still face real barriers around grid reliability and maintenance. Still, what’s emerging here is a transferable blueprint, not just a local win.

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170,000 Americans get student loan debt erased in historic settlement

By / / Good News For Humankind

A federal court has refused the Department of Education’s bid to delay relief by 18 months, unlocking $11 billion in cancellations for borrowers who filed borrower-defense claims during a 2022 filing window. The Sweet v. McMahon class action, filed in 2019, targeted the government’s failure to process claims from students defrauded by collapsed for-profit schools like Corinthian Colleges. Advocates call it the largest settlement against the U.S. government in history — a model for winning relief through litigation, not executive action. Still, millions of borrowers fall outside it, and the $11 billion is a sliver of the $1.66 trillion Americans owe.

Canadian flag, for article on sperm donor restrictions

Canada ends sperm donor restrictions for gay and bisexual men

By / / Good News For Humankind

Gay and bisexual men in Canada can now donate sperm without facing blanket behavioral screening — a shift driven entirely by one man’s refusal to drop a lawsuit. Medical experts confirmed in court that modern HIV testing carries effectively no residual risk, making the old restrictions scientifically indefensible. The change may also help ease Canada’s persistent sperm shortage, though the ban on paid donation remains the deeper structural cause of that gap. When individual plaintiffs hold institutions to their own stated values, the legal record they build can pressure similar policies worldwide.

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New Jersey declares “functional zero” on veteran homelessness

By / / Good News For Humankind

Veteran homelessness in New Jersey is no longer a chronic reality — it’s now rare, brief, and recoverable, meeting the “functional zero” benchmark that only a handful of states have reached. Since launching the Bringing Veterans Home Initiative in 2024, a coordinated network of state, federal, and local agencies has permanently housed more than 2,500 veterans. Officials are candid that sustaining this takes ongoing funding and staffing — and that affordable housing supply remains a real pressure. Still, New Jersey has proven that ending veteran homelessness isn’t idealism. It’s an operational problem that coordination and political will can actually solve.

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California becomes first major economy powered over 50% by solar

By / / Good News For Humankind

For the first five months of 2026, California generated more electricity from the sun than from natural gas — the fuel that dominated its grid for decades. The tipping point came in May, when solar carried clean power across a full month at a scale that dwarfs most national grids. Grid-scale batteries made it possible, storing midday sunshine and releasing it into the evening peak. The shift is real but unfinished — July heat waves pushed gas back up — yet analysts say this could be the first year solar beats gas outright.

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U.S. scientists restore a last-resort antibiotic’s power over superbugs

By / / Good News For Humankind

Drug-resistant infections already kill more than a million people a year worldwide and contribute to nearly 5 million deaths — a toll projected to climb toward 10 million annually by 2050 if nothing changes. Now researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and Scripps Research and in California have found a way to fight back without inventing new drugs: a small companion molecule, pghi-4, that disables a key bacterial defense and lets vancomycin kill resistant bacteria again in lab tests. The approach is years from clinical use, but restoring the antibiotics medicine already has could eventually save millions of lives.

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El Salvador becomes first Central American country to eliminate trachoma, WHO says

By / / Good News For Humankind

El Salvador’s trachoma elimination shows what’s possible when basic health infrastructure finally reaches the communities most often left behind. Trachoma — the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness — thrives where clean water and health care are scarce, so clearing it signals those foundations have genuinely taken hold. The achievement came through three years of community outreach, expanded sanitation, and trained health workers catching cases early. Global elimination by 2030 remains ambitious, with several neighboring countries still mapping where the disease even exists. But El Salvador’s path from suspected cases to full certification offers a credible model for the region.

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California returns 136 acres of coastline to Indigenous tribes in a state first

By / / Good News For Humankind

Indigenous land return in California just reached a milestone that could open doors for tribes across the state. Three Pomo nations will now steward Blues Beach and its surrounding bluffs in Mendocino County — a stretch of coastline their ancestors lived on, gathered from, and held as sacred. A new state law made this possible, creating the legal pathway for Caltrans to transfer land to tribal governments for the first time. The tribes plan cultural camps, ecological surveys, and careful stewardship on their own terms. This is what land justice can look like when policy catches up with principle.

Wind turbines, for article on SunZia wind project

Largest-ever U.S. renewable energy project comes online, supplying power to 1 million homes

By / / Good News For Humankind

SunZia is now the largest wind energy project in U.S. history, and its scale changes what Americans can imagine building. Its 916 turbines generate more power than the Hoover Dam, delivered through one of the first major long-distance HVDC transmission lines completed in the country in decades. Over 30 years, the project will send $1.3 billion directly to local governments, schools, and landowners in New Mexico and Arizona — communities that have long watched energy wealth flow elsewhere. It’s proof that transformational clean energy infrastructure can actually get built, and a model other regions will be watching closely.