HERE IN THIS POST, YOU WILL SEE A FEW REALLY INTERESTING IDEAS AROUND THE WORLD AND ONE OF THEM HAS GAINED OUR INTEREST HERE IN AUSTRALIA - THERE ARE A FEW BRANCHES IN DIFFERENT LOCATIONS. I BET YOU CAN'T GUESS! IT STARTED IN A SMALL WAY WITH A CARING PRACTICLE PERSON WITH A PASSIONATE VISION TO HELP OTHERS AND IT DRAWS A LOT OF PEOPLE TO SOME OF THESE VENUES. I PERSONALLY WITNESSED ONE OF THESE OCCASIONS LAST YEAR AND CONVERSED WITH SOME OF THE FOLK WHO WERE THERE. IT WAS QUITE EXCITING FINDING THEM THERE UNPRESIDENTED, BECAUSE I KNEW ABOUT THE ORGINAL ONE YOU WILL SEE ON THIS PAGE. I WILL ADD MORE SHORT STORIES AS I FIND THEM. ENJOY!
French Post Workers Help The Elderly
“It’s lovely to see the postman as I don’t usually see anyone else all week,” says 81-year-old Janine. She’s enjoying a French postal service initiative that’s helping elderly people living in isolation far from relatives.
Under the scheme, called “Watch over my parents” (Veiller sur mes parents), families can pay from €20 a month for postmen and postwomen to check on their parents during morning rounds. The home visits can be weekly or more frequent with reports delivered back to the family. Additional services such as a 24-hour helpline and alert system are available.
Janine lives in the Vaucluse region of southern France: her husband died years ago, and her daughters live 600 kilometres away in Paris. “They worry that I’m on my own in the middle of nowhere,” she says. Visited by postman Nicolas Dezeure, she relishes their 15-minute Monday morning chats in her kitchen.
“She knows loads about me!” says Dezeure, who messages Janine’s daughters after his visits.
“People are living longer,” observes Eric Baudrillard, head of new strategy at the French postal service. “More want to stay in their own homes for as long as they can.”
Bus Stops Turned Into Havens For Bees
The Dutch city of Utrecht has turned more than 300 of its bus stops into shelters for bees. These “bee stops” now have green roofs planted mainly with sedum, a drought-resistant plant favoured by pollinators, which also captures dust and rainwater. The new bee-friendly stops are cared for by a team of workers who use electric vehicles. [Source: Metro]
Anyone want to wait at these bus stops? "Not me!" you're probably saying. I love the bees when they come to visit my garden - I have found that if we leave them alone, they're happy to leave us alone:)
Kids Learn Braille The Fun Way
Lego has unveiled a project to help blind and visually impaired children learn Braille in a “playful and engaging way” amid concerns that fewer children are learning the system because of audiobooks and computer programs.
Its new “Braille Bricks” will be moulded with the same studs used for letters and numbers in the Braille alphabet. They will also feature printed characters to allow sighted teachers and family to read them.
Repair Café Inspires The World
“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” says Martine Postma, long frustrated by our throwaway culture. “I wanted to do something about it.”
What she did was to open the first Repair Café in Amsterdam, a social space where people could learn to fix anything from vacuum cleaners and toys to jewellery and clothes—rather than throw them in the trash.
The idea quickly spread. This year, the Amsterdam café marks its 10th anniversary—and has now inspired more than 1,500 other repair cafés around the world.
For a small fee, Postma’s Repair Café Foundation helps people in other cities open their own cafés. It provides a step-by-step manual along with other support and the basic approach is the same.
Volunteer repair experts show café-goers how to fix their broken items. “They like sharing the knowledge and helping other people,” says Postma. “It’s about doing something together, in the here and now.”
Breaking Smartphone Addictions
Smartphones have become such a part of modern life that for many of us living without one feels impossible—and their power to distract has been shown to make people less productive.
Now three entrepreneurs who met at Copenhagen Business School—Maths Mathisen, Florian Winder and Vinoth Vinaya—have launched an app to combat smartphone addiction, particularly among students.
Called Hold, the free app tracks the continuous minutes during the day that a person doesn’t use their smartphone. It then awards the user points for showing restraint. The longer they resist checking their device, the more points they get. Those points can then be used to purchase products and services—such as cinema tickets—or enter competitions or donate to charities via the app’s marketplace.
“We want to reward users for not using their phone, rather than punish them,” says co-founder Maths Mathisen.
Trials at universities in Scandinavia and the UK have seen students report greater concentration levels as they hold off checking their phones for notifications.
You guessed it, there are 40+ Repair Cafes here in Australia.
There is a list of them on this link I found for you, The list is growing!
REPAIRING AUSTRALIA: THE RISE OF REPAIR CAFES HERE
Learn While Reclaiming Lost Items
The volunteer “fixers” who attend the Repair Café bring a wealth of knowledge to share with visitors. Some come from mechanical engineering or trades backgrounds, textiles expertise or trained jewellery-makers, for example. Yet others have accumulated years of practice in repairing their own things. They have a curious nature and love the sense of achievement when that niggling fault has been found and fixed. HERE